Mobile applications, also known as apps, are dedicated software systems that run on handheld devices, such as smartphones and tablet computers. The apps business has in a few years turned into a multi-billion dollar market. From a software engineering perspective apps represent a new phenomenon, and there is a need for tools and techniques to analyze apps.

We present SAMOA, a visual web-based software analytics platform for mobile applications. It mines software repositories of apps and uses a set of visualization techniques to present the mined data. We describe SAMOA, detail the analyses it supports, and describe a methodology to understand apps from a structural and historical perspective.