Exploring Smart Home Mobile Apps Market: A Topic Modeling Approach to Mobile App Reviews

Today’s consumers have been experiencing new technologies in recent years with the intensive use of mobile devices and technology. Smart home technologies, one of the recent decades’ technologies, facilitate consumers’ home lives and create different research contexts for consumer research. Smart home technologies containing various devices and sensors can be used through mobile applications and consumer experience is crucial for understanding the marketplace. The study examining the context of smart home mobile apps aims to identify the topics covered in user reviews of smart home mobile apps. For this purpose, topic modeling methodology through BERTopic transformer-based model is employed in the study and 15.157 user reviews regarding 35 mobile apps in Google Play store are used as study sample. Individual topics detected in topic modeling are grouped into eight main topics (brand/model mention, feature, functionality, products/devices, service experience, user experience, user feedback, user interface). The topics concluded in the study help understanding of smart home mobile apps market and the study extends the eWOM concept by smart home mobile applications context.