Hall-of-Apps: The Top Android Apps Metadata Archive

The amount of Android apps available for download is constantly increasing, exerting a continuous pressure on developers to publish outstanding apps. Google Play (GP) is the default distribution channel for Android apps, which provides mobile app users with metrics to identify and report apps quality such as rating, amount of downloads, previous users comments, etc. In addition to those metrics, GP presents a set of top charts that highlight the outstanding apps in different categories. Both metrics and top app charts help developers to identify whether their development decisions are well valued by the community. Therefore, app presence in these top charts is a valuable information when understanding the features of top-apps. In this paper we present <strong>Hall-of-Apps</strong>, a dataset containing top charts' apps metadata extracted (weekly) from GP, for 4 different countries, during 30 weeks. The data is presented as (i) raw HTML files, (ii) a MongoDB database with all the information contained in app's HTML files (e.g., app description, category, general rating, etc.), and (iii) data visualizations built with the D3.js framework. A first characterization of the data along with the urls to retrieve it can be found in our online appendix: https://thesoftwaredesignlab.github.io/hall-of-apps-tools/

可下载的安卓应用数量持续攀升，这给应用开发者带来了持续的研发压力，促使其推出更具竞争力的优质应用。谷歌应用商店（Google Play，GP）是安卓应用的默认分发渠道，为移动应用用户提供了多种用于评估与反馈应用质量的指标，例如评分、下载量、历史用户评论等。除上述指标外，谷歌应用商店还设有一系列排行榜，用以展示不同分类下的优质应用。这些指标与应用排行榜均可帮助开发者判断自身的研发决策是否获得了用户社区的认可。因此，若要了解头部应用的特征，应用能否登上此类排行榜便是一项极具价值的参考信息。本文提出了**Hall-of-Apps**数据集：该数据集采集了30周内、4个不同国家的谷歌应用商店排行榜应用的元数据，采集频率为每周一次。该数据集以三种形式呈现：(i) 原始HTML文件；(ii) 存储了应用HTML文件中全部信息的MongoDB数据库（例如应用描述、分类、综合评分等）；(iii) 基于D3.js框架构建的数据可视化内容。该数据集的初步特征分析与获取链接可在我们的在线附录中查阅：https://thesoftwaredesignlab.github.io/hall-of-apps-tools/