On Quality Assessment of Websites Offering Mobile Applications

Abstract

The primary objective of this article is to conduct a comparative analysis and evaluation of the quality of the largest and the oldest websites offering mobile applications from clients’ perspective at two points in time in 2014 and five years later, i.e. in 2019. The analysis, similarly to the one performed five years earlier, was limited to three services: Google Play, App Store and Windows Phone. The research problem which the authors tried to solve by means of this comparison consisted in identifying the changes which occurred with regard to clients’ assessment of the selected websites and providing recommendations concerning this area of activity. The research sample, as in the case of the previous study, was limited to the students of two Warsaw universities. The survey was made available to randomly selected didactic groups. After the verification of the survey using a pilot study, the questionnaire has been modified and better adapted to the requirements of the respondents. The comparison has been carried out with the application of a scoring method, and the evaluation was performed with the use of a simplified Likert scale. The obtained findings enabled the authors to draw conclusions concerning increasingly worse scores given for the quality of websites providing applications, which seems to be the result of clients’ growing awareness of the possibilities offered by e-commerce and the functionalities of mobile devices. The tendencies that have been confirmed by the study included Google Play moving towards a leading position, the platform’s sharing the market with App Store and the decreasing role of Windows Phone in this ranking. In particular sections of the article, the authors presented the research problem and the method they used in their study, characterised and justified the selection of the study sample, presented and discussed the findings and, finally, commented on the detailed conclusions drawn from the study.