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This project started with a question that has nothing to do with app stores. When I wrote the thesis, using generative AI was discouraged, and in practice that meant don’t. ChatGPT had been public for about two months, and nobody argued with the rule. Three years on, the same rule looks almost impossible to enforce, and harder still to justify. I’d struggle to find a student who isn’t using some AI help on a thesis, and I’d struggle more to argue they shouldn’t. That reversal, not the app store literature, is why I reopened my own work this year. I didn’t want to rewrite it. I wanted to see what a second, more sceptical pass would find in something I’d trusted untouched for three years. ...

Note: While I’m publishing this blog post in August 2023, I started writing it in September 2022, when I still was living in Tübingen. This means that many things may have changed since then, mainly prices, affected by last year’s inflation rates. However, I still decided to complete this post to conclude the triad of articles that I set out to do at the beginning. After one year as a student in Tübingen, I’ll try to share with you all the knowledge of the city and the surrounding area I gained. ...

Premise This blog post contains the full text of my Master Thesis, written at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen and at the University of Pavia and submitted for the first time during February 2023. In September 2026 I reopened this work and reanalyzed the original data. That second pass found three mistakes in the analysis (none of them in the data itself), and is documented in I Asked an AI to Review My Thesis. The text below is the thesis as it was submitted, left unchanged. ...

During my stay in Tübingen (Germany), hiking was one of my favourite activities and I have to admit the surrounding area is very suitable to hike. Therefore, I created a collection of all the hikes I did and I also selected some of the best ones, which will be immediately presented as Top Hikes. Each hike will be presented through the Strava activity, which often also include some pictures, and I’ll also include a link to the Komoot activity, since it allows you to download the GPX file, which can be used to replicate the hike. ...

I created a collection of 36 photos that, in my opinion, best represent my experience in Tübingen (Germany). These pictures cover a period from October 2021 to September 2022 and were mainly taken in Tübingen and in the surrounding area, with just few exceptions coming from some other attractive German cities. The collection is entitled “One year in Tü. A Chapter.” and it is fully available on my Flickr profile. All the photos are published under the CC BY-NC-SA license. ...

Below you can find the full document version of my Master Thesis, written at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen and at the University of Pavia and submitted for the first time during February 2023. The research question investigates which characteristic out of reputation, popularity and developer’s brand, reflected in some elements in the presentation page on app stores, is the most effective in predicting user’s choice to download an app. ...