App Insights

App Insights is a mobile app that runs on top of IBM Bluemix. The app uses Watson Discovery service to provide analysis of reviews extracted from the top ten free apps in the App Store.

Features

Sentiment Over Time: Sentiment based on specific target phrases the Discovery service finds in each review.
Keywords: Important topics pulled from each review.
Opportunities: Reviews returned by querying the Discovery service. Each review represents an opportunity for an app developer to discover which features to implement, change or delete.

Building App Insights

Prerequisites

Bluemix account
Cloudant account can be added onto your app through Bluemix.
Discovery Service Instance added to your app from Bluemix as well.
Building App Insights requires Xcode 8.x.
Downloading app dependencies requires Carthage 0.18.1.

Setup Backend Configuration

Python is used to extract, parse and upload reviews grabbed from the App Store's RSS feeds. It then cleans the data and uploads app details into Cloudant, and app reviews into the Discovery service.

Install the following third-party dependencies the Python scripts require:

pip install --upgrade watson-developer-cloud
pip install cloudant
pip install -U python-dotenv
pip install beautifulsoup4
pip install lxml
pip install cssselect

Insert your Discovery and Cloudant credentials into the Scripts/.env file.

Name your Discovery collection and Cloudant database anything you prefer. If the Discovery collection or Cloudant database instance doesn't exist, the Python script will create them for you (assuming the credentials for each service was filled in correctly).

Run these two scripts in this order to load Cloudant and Discovery with information:

python Scripts/ingest_reviews.py
python Scripts/extract_upload_app_details.py

The ingest_reviews.py script crawls reviews from the top 10 free apps by extracting reviews from the App Store's RSS feeds, then ingests the reviews into the Discovery service to enrich.

The extract_upload_app_details.py script extracts general app detail information. This includes app name, description, URL, number of reviews, rating, etc. This information is then stored inside Cloudant to be called by the app.

Setup Frontend Configuration

Install third-party dependencies using Carthage. The first time you run this command can take up to 20 minutes.

cd app-insights-iOS
cd carthage update --platform iOS

This command pulls all dependencies from Carthage. We currently use the Graphs, Watson Developer Cloud's Swift SDK and SwiftyJSON libraries.

Insert your Discovery and Cloudant username and passwords into the app-insights-iOS/app-insights/Credentials.swift. Insert the same Discovery collection name and Cloudant database name you created when running the Python scripts into the Configuration file.

Running the project

Press build and run to see the app running in Xcode's iPhone simulator.