Provider of "in-the-wild" app testing services uTest has unveiled Applause, a mobile app analytics product. Applause is available free of charge and will be spun out of uTest as an independent brand.
Applause analyzes more than 50 million app reviews across 1 million iOS and Android apps. It then synthesizes this data into a 0-100 Applause Score for each app and grades it across ten Applause Attributes. This data is intended to enable brands to improve mobile app quality, increase user satisfaction, and measure how their app stacks up from version to version, and against the competition.
The firm says that existing analytics tools can help brands infer what users think based upon usage patterns, which is both valid and valuable. But when it comes to understanding what users are truly saying about how to make an app better, brands haven't had the tools they need to listen effectively or efficiently.
"The apps economy is growing so rapidly, spawning new upstarts and challenging incumbents — and it's time we enter a new phase of maturity in how companies measure their mobile efforts," said Doron Reuveni, CEO and co-founder of uTest. "Users simply expect apps to perform flawlessly — the first time, every time. With Applause, we're enabling companies to go well beyond simple download counts and star ratings to understand app quality in a deeper way, which is why we've had such tremendous feedback from early users."
Applause crawls millions of reviews and ratings to provide each app with an "Applause Score" on a scale of 1-100. Applause further breaks down each app across ten key Applause Attributes:
- Content — relevance of an app's content across locations and cultures
- Elegance — how attractive, cool, or slick an app's design is
- Interoperability — how well an app integrates with other services or hardware
- Performance — how fast and responsive an app is in standard usage
- Pricing — how an app's perceived value compares with its cost
- Privacy — comfort with an app's terms of service and handling of PII
- Satisfaction — how well an app satisfies users' core expectations
- Security — perceived risk to logins, passwords, or other sensitive information
- Stability — how often the app crashes, hangs, or freezes
- Usability — ease of navigation and discoverability among an app's features
"This type of actionable, explicit app analytics fills an enormous blind spot for brands," said Yvonne Genovese, managing vice president at Gartner. "Until now, companies merely knew how many stars their app had received, occasionally read reviews, or looked at implicit analytics to infer how users felt about their apps. Now, brands can see results of deep data analysis and make informed decisions about where to best direct resources so apps perform as intended, delight their users and, in the process, maintain an edge on the competition."
