  Market and user characteristics of mobile apps make their release management
different from proprietary software products and web services. Despite the
wealth of information regarding users' feedback on an app, an in-depth analysis
of app releases is difficult due to the inconsistency and uncertainty of the
information. To better understand and potentially improve app release
processes, we analyze major, minor, and patch releases for releases following
semantic versioning. In particular, we were interested in finding out the
difference between marketed and not-marketed releases. Our results show that,
in general, major, minor, and patch releases have significant differences in
the release cycle duration, nature, and change velocity. We also observed that
there is a significant difference between marketed and non-marketed mobile app
releases in terms of cycle duration, nature and the extent of changes, and the
number of opened and closed issues.
