The App Jungle

Abstract: Since the introduction of app stores, the market for apps has grown exponentially. The Apple App Store announced in 2014 that it had reached 85 billion downloads. The growth of the market has made the landscape highly competitive and only a small percentage of these apps gain virality. This study aims to analyze the influence different factors have on an app in App Store. The chosen factors are the rating of the app and the design of the app icon. A quantitative research was made in which the respondents were shown different versions of an app and thereafter asked to state their perception of it. In an attempt to generalize the results, the experiment was conducted with two different app categories. The results indicated that rating do not have any significant impact on consumers' perception. However, the icon strongly influences the consumers' perception, where a picture icon is preferable to a letter icon. The implication of our findings is that app developers do not need to pay as much attention to the rating of their app. However, when designing the app icon, the app developer should preferably use an image instead of a letter icon.