Analysing app reviews for software engineering: a systematic literature review

App reviews found in app stores can provide critically valuable information to help software engineers understand user requirements and to design, debug, and evolve software products. Over the last ten years, a vast amount of research has been produced to study what useful information might be found in app reviews, and how to mine and organise such information as efficiently as possible. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of this research, covering 182 papers published between 2012 and 2020. This survey classifies app review analysis not only in terms of mined information and applied data mining techniques but also, and most importantly, in terms of supported software engineering activities. The survey also reports on the quality and results of empirical evaluation of existing techniques and identifies important avenues for further research. This survey can be of interest to researchers and commercial organisations developing app review analysis techniques and to software engineers considering to use app review analysis.