Studying the consistency of star ratings and reviews of popular free hybrid Android and iOS apps

Nowadays, many developers make their mobile apps available on multiple platforms (e.g., Android and iOS). However, maintaining several versions of a cross-platform app that is built natively (i.e., using platform-specific tools) is a complicated task. Instead, developers can choose to use hybrid development tools, such as PhoneGap, to build hybrid apps. Hybrid apps are based on a single codebase across platforms. There exist two ways to use a hybrid development tool to build a hybrid app that runs on multiple platforms: (1) using web technologies (i.e., HTML, Javascript and CSS) and (2) in a common language, which is then converted to native code. We study whether these hybrid development tools achieve their main purpose: delivering an app that is perceived similarly by users across platforms. Prior studies show that users refer to star ratings and user reviews, when deciding to download an app. Given the importance of star ratings and user reviews, we study whether the usage of a hybrid development tool assists app developers in achieving consistency in the star ratings and user reviews across multiple platforms. We study 68 hybrid app-pairs, i.e., apps that exist both in the Google Play store and Apple App store. We find that 33 out of 68 hybrid apps do not receive consistent star ratings across platforms. We run Twitter-LDA on user reviews and find that the star ratings of the reviews that discuss the same topic could be up to three times as high across platforms. Our findings suggest that while hybrid apps are better at providing consistent star ratings and user reviews when compared to cross-platform apps that are built natively, hybrid apps do not guarantee such consistency. Hence, developers should not solely rely on hybrid development tools to achieve consistency in the star ratings and reviews that are given by users of their apps. In particular, developers should track closely the ratings and reviews of their apps across platforms, so that they can act accordingly when platform-specific issues arise.