# Prioritizing App Reviews for Developer Responses on Google Play

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.01520 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01520/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 3 Feb 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Enhancing Glass Defect Detection with Diffusion Models: Addressing Imbalanced Datasets in Manufacturing Quality Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03134/) (2025)
- [Same Game, Different Story: A Minimal Conservative Strategic Robustness Benchmark for Large Language Model Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19670/) (2026)
- [LLM Serving in the Wild: An Empirical Study of Frameworks, Methods, and System Designs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03036/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The number of applications in Google Play has increased dramatically in recent years. On Google Play, users can write detailed reviews and rate apps, with these ratings significantly influencing app success and download numbers. Reviews often include notable information like feature requests, which are valuable for software maintenance. Users can update their reviews and ratings anytime. Studies indicate that apps with ratings below three stars are typically avoided by potential users. Since 2013, Google Play has allowed developers to respond to user reviews, helping resolve issues and potentially boosting overall ratings and download rates. However, responding to reviews is time-consuming, and only 13% to 18% of developers engage in this practice. To address this challenge, we propose a method to prioritize reviews based on response priority. We collected and preprocessed review data, extracted both textual and semantic features, and assessed their impact on the importance of responses. We labelled reviews as requiring a response or not and trained four different machine learning models to prioritize them. We evaluated the models performance using metrics such as F1-Score, Accuracy, Precision, and Recall. Our findings indicate that the XGBoost model is the most effective for prioritizing reviews needing a response.