Development of a Segmentation Algorithm for Identifying the Life Cycle of Smartphone Applications

The concept of product life cycle has been applied extensively to a broad range of products and services that remain in use for a long time after they are purchased. Ordinarily, the stage of the product cycle can be determined by tracing the number of products sold during the underlying time unit along the time axis. For digital products and services offered through the Internet, however, life cycle may not be determined in a similar manner because such products and services may be repeatedly installed and uninstalled dynamically over time. Because of this, and the difficulty of acquiring real data, there is little literature on the product life cycle of Internet-related digital products and services. Recently, a Japanese software development company, Fuller, Inc., developed Android smartphone applications that enabled the company to obtain actual data concerning installments and un-installments of smartphone applications through the legitimate agreement between the company and the users of these applications. Based on the large volume of smartphone applications usage data acquired from Fuller, Inc., this paper aims to fill the above gap by capturing the product life cycle of smartphone applications. Keeping the feature of dynamic installment and un-installment of smartphone applications in mind, the authors develop a segmentation algorithm to classify smartphone applications into three categories based on product life cycle: Class (A), smartphone applications that are active in life cycle; Class (B), smartphone applications that are at the tail of the life cycle; and Class (C), smartphone applications that are already diminishing. Numerical results are presented to validate the proposed segmentation algorithm.