A Large-Scale Exploratory Study of Android Sports Apps in the Google Play Store

Prior studies on mobile app analysis often analyze apps across different categories or focus on a small set of apps within a category. These studies either provide general insights for an entire app store which consists of millions of apps, or provide specific insights for a small set of apps. However, a single app category can often contain tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of apps. For example, according to AppBrain, there are 46,625 apps in the “Sports” category of Google Play apps. Analyzing such a targeted category of apps can provide more specific insights than analyzing apps across categories while still benefiting many app developers interested in the category. This work aims to study a large number of apps from a single category (i.e., the sports category). Our work can provide two folds contributions: 1) identifying insights that are specific to tens of thousands of sports apps, and 2) providing empirical evidence on the benefits of analyzing apps in a specific category. We perform an empirical study on over two thousand sports apps in the Google Play Store. We study the characteristics of these apps (e.g., their targeted sports types and main functionalities) through manual analysis, the topics in the user review through topic modeling, as well as the aspects that contribute to the negative opinions of users through analysis of user ratings and sentiment. We identified sports apps that cover 16 sports types (e.g., Football, Cricket, Baseball) and 15 main functionalities (e.g., Betting, Betting Tips, Training, Tracking). We also extracted 14 topics from the user reviews, among which three are specific to sports apps (accuracy of prediction, up-to-dateness, and precision of tools). Finally, we observed that users are mainly complaining about the advertisements and quality (e.g., bugs, content quality, streaming quality) of sports apps. It is concluded that analyzing a targeted category of apps (e.g., sports apps) can provide more specific insights than analyzing apps across different categories while still being relevant for a large number (e.g., tens of thousands) of apps. Besides, as a rapid-growing and competitive market, sports apps provide rich opportunities for future research, for example, to study the integration of data science or machine learning techniques in software applications or to study the factors that influence the competitiveness of the apps.