Hall-of-Apps: The Top Android Apps Metadata Archive

The amount of Android apps available for download is constantly increasing, exerting a continuous pressure on developers to publish outstanding apps. Google Play (GP) is the default distribution channel for Android apps, which provides mobile app users  with metrics to identify and report apps quality such as rating, amount of downloads, previous users comments, etc. In addition to those metrics, GP presents a set of top charts that highlight the outstanding apps in different categories. Both metrics and top app charts help developers to identify whether their development decisions are well valued by the community. Therefore, app presence in these top charts is a valuable information when understanding the features of top-apps. In this paper we present Hall-of-Apps, a dataset containing top charts' apps metadata extracted (weekly) from GP, for 4 different countries, during 30 weeks. The data is presented as (i) raw HTML files, (ii) a MongoDB database with all the information contained in app's HTML files (e.g., app description, category, general rating, etc.), and (iii) data visualizations built with the D3.js framework. A first characterization of the data along with the urls to retrieve it can be found in our online appendix: https://thesoftwaredesignlab.github.io/hall-of-apps-tools/