Software

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

Questa è la relazione finale con cui ho ottenuto la mia laurea triennale in Economia e Gestione Aziendale all’Università degli Studi di Brescia. Come potete intuire, la relazione tratta uno degli argomenti a cui sono più interessato: lo sviluppo e la commercializzazione dei software. La stesura di questo documento ha rappresentato per me un primo approccio a questi argomenti che non erano coperti nel mio corso di studi ed è stato un buon punto di partenza per la compresione delle dinamiche che muovono quel mercato. In quel momento ero quasi totalmente inconsapevole della letteratura passata sull’argomento, risultando superficiale in alcuni passaggi, e sicuramente alcuni argomenti necessitano di un ulteriore approfondimento. ...