Studying the Consistency of Star Ratings and Reviews of Popular Free Hybrid Android and iOS Apps

We study 68 hybrid app-pairs, i.e., apps that exist both in the Google Play
store and Apple App store. We find that 33 out of 68 hybrid apps do not receive
consistent star ratings across platforms. We run Twitter-LDA on user reviews and
find that the star ratings of the reviews that discuss the same topic could be up
to four times as high across platforms. Our findings suggest that while hybrid
apps are better at providing consistent star ratings and user reviews, they do not
improve the consistency in star ratings and user reviews at a great extent when
compared to cross-platform apps that are built natively. Hence, developers should
not solely rely on hybrid development tools to achieve the consistency in the star
ratings and reviews given by their users.