Understanding and prediction of mobile application usage for smart phones

Abstract

It is becoming harder to find an app on one's smart phone due to the increasing number of apps available and installed on smart phones today. We collect sensory data including app use from smart phones, to perform a comprehensive analysis of the context related to mobile app use, and build prediction models that calculate the probability of an app in the current context. Based on these models, we developed a dynamic home screen application that presents icons for the most probable apps on the main screen of the phone and highlights the most probable one. Our models outperformed other strategies, and, in particular, improved prediction accuracy by 8% over Most Frequently Used from 79.8% to 87.8% (for 9 candidate apps). Also, we found that the dynamic home screen improved accessibility to apps on the phone, compared to the conventional static home screen in terms of accuracy, required touch input and app selection time. Copyright 2012 ACM.