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$\textbf{Context}$: The release planning of mobile apps has become an area of
active research, with most studies centering on app analysis through release
notes in the Apple App Store and tracking user reviews via issue trackers.
However, the correlation between these release notes and user reviews in App
Store remains understudied. $\textbf{Objective}$: In this paper, we introduce
$\textit{RoseMatcher}$, a novel automatic approach to match relevant user
reviews with app release notes and identify matched pairs with high confidence.
$\textbf{Methods}$: We collected 944 release notes and 1,046,862 user reviews
from 5 mobile apps in the Apple App Store as research data to evaluate the
effectiveness and accuracy of $\textit{RoseMatcher}$, and conducted deep
content analysis on matched pairs. $\textbf{Results}$: Our evaluation shows
that $\textit{RoseMatcher}$ can reach a hit ratio of 0.718 for identifying
relevant matched pairs, and with the manual labeling and content analysis of
984 relevant pairs, we identify 8 roles that user reviews play in app updates
according to the relationship between release notes and user reviews in the
relevant matched pairs. $\textbf{Conclusions}$: Our findings indicate that both
app development teams and users pay close attention to release notes and user
reviews, with release notes typically addressing feature requests, bug reports,
and complaints, and user reviews offering positive, negative, and constructive
feedback. Overall, the study highlights the importance of the communication
between app development teams and users in the release planning of mobile apps,
with relevant reviews tending to be posed within a short period before and
after the release of release notes, with the average time interval between the
post time of release notes and user reviews being approximately one year.
