Role of CI Adoption in Mobile App Success: An Empirical Study of Open-Source Android Projects
Xiaoxin Zhou, Taher A. Ghaleb, Safwat Hassan
TL;DR
The study empirically investigates the role of Continuous Integration (CI) adoption in mobile app success by analyzing 2,542 open-source Android projects. It links CI configuration data from GitHub with repository metrics and Google Play Store engagement to assess development activity, release cadence, and user-facing outcomes. Key findings show that CI adopters are larger and more active, release faster, and enjoy higher Google Play engagement, while pre/post adoption effects on app ratings or reviews are not consistently positive in the short term. The work contributes a replication-ready dataset, predictive models (Random Forest and clustering), and nuanced insights into how CI adoption interacts with project maturity, pipeline practices, and user outcomes, highlighting that CI improves engineering efficiency but requires appropriate release and feedback practices to translate into external success. The results underscore the variability of CI impact across projects and categories, guiding practitioners to tailor CI pipelines to their domain and lifecycle stage, and motivating future cross-domain and longitudinal studies.
Abstract
Mobile apps face strong pressure for fast and reliable updates. Continuous Integration (CI) helps automate builds, tests, and releases, but its impact on mobile development remains underexplored. Despite the widespread use of CI, little is known about how it affects development activity, release speed, and user-facing outcomes in mobile projects. Existing studies mostly focus on CI adoption in general-purpose software, providing limited insight into mobile-specific dynamics, such as app store visibility and user engagement. In this paper, we analyze open-source Android apps to (1) compare CI adopters and non-adopters, (2) characterize adoption patterns using activity and bug metrics, and (3) assess pre/post adoption changes and user-facing outcomes. We observe that CI adopters are larger and more active, with faster and more regular releases. CI adoption is concentrated in integration- and reliability-intensive categories (e.g., finance and productivity) and is associated with higher Google Play Store engagement (more downloads and reviews) without lower ratings. Overall, CI adoption aligns with practices that support sustained delivery, higher project visibility, and stronger user engagement in mobile ecosystems.