Mining user requirements to facilitate mobile app quality upgrades with big data

•A novel ranking model is proposed to rank the importance of customer requirements.•The rating data and review data are combined for feature engineering.•Context-award text analytics is suggested for customer requirement mining.•Companies are benefit to adopt online customer requirements for product improvements. A domain-dependent customer requirements mining framework to facilitate mobile app quality upgrades is proposed in this paper. We develop a new ranking model to rank the importance of different customer requirements by considering both the rating data and review data. We prove the effectiveness in terms of product quality improvements based on 265 version update cases for 15 popular mobile apps. As there is little research regarding identifying the business value of customer requirements mining, this study can be highly beneficial to the further development of research concerning the business value of adopting online customer requirements for product improvements.