User Driven Functionality Deletion for Mobile Apps
Maleknaz Nayebi, Konstantin Kuznetsov, Andreas Zeller, Guenther Ruhe · 2023
Evolving software with an increasing number of features is harder to understand and thus harder to use. Software release planning has been concerned with planning these additions. Moreover, software of increasing size takes more effort to be maintained. In the domain of mobile apps, too much functionality can easily impact usability, maintainability, and resource consumption. Hence, it is important to understand the extent to which the law of continuous growth applies to mobile apps. Previous work showed that the deletion of functionality is common and sometimes driven by user reviews. However, it is unknown whether these deletions are visible or important to the app users. In this study, we surveyed 297 mobile app users to understand the significance of functionality deletion for them. Our results showed that for most users, the deletion of features corresponds with negative sentiments and change in usage and even churn. Motivated by these preliminary results, we propose Radiation to input user reviews and recommend if any functionality should be deleted from an app's User Interface (UI). We evaluate Radiation using historical data and surveying developers' opinions. From the analysis of 190,062 reviews from 115 randomly selected apps, we show that Radiation can recommend functionality deletion with an average F-Score of 74% and if sufficiently many negative user reviews suggest so.