Related papers: Misbehavior in Mobile Application Markets
In today's mobile application marketplace, the ability of consumers to make informed choices regarding their privacy is extremely limited. Consumers largely rely on privacy policies and app permission mechanisms, but these do an inadequate…
In this paper, we outline some potential conflicts that platform owners and software developers face in mobile application markets. Our arguments are based on comments captured in specialized online discussion forums, in which developers…
The movement to mobile computing solutions provides flexibility to different users whether it is a business user, a student, or even providing entertainment to children and adults of all ages. Due to these emerging technologies mobile users…
In this paper a novel system for detecting meaningful deviations in a mobile application's network behavior is proposed. The main goal of the proposed system is to protect mobile device users and cellular infrastructure companies from…
China is one of the largest Android markets in the world. As Chinese users cannot access Google Play to buy and install Android apps, a number of independent app stores have emerged and compete in the Chinese app market. Some of the Chinese…
Within the thriving mobile app ecosystem ecosystem, a subset of apps provides illicit services such as gambling and pornography to pursue economic gains, collectively referred to as "underground economy apps". While previous studies have…
The proper use of Android app permissions is crucial to the success and security of these apps. Users must agree to permission requests when installing or running their apps. Despite official Android platform documentation on proper…
"App stores" are online software stores where end users may browse, purchase, download, and install software applications. By far, the best known app stores are associated with mobile platforms, such as Google Play for Android and Apple's…
The widespread use of smartphones and tablets has made society heavily reliant on mobile applications (apps) for accessing various resources and services. These apps often handle sensitive personal, financial, and health data, making app…
Background Despite the benefits offered by an abundance of health applications promoted on app marketplaces (e.g., Google Play Store), the wide adoption of mobile health and e-health apps is yet to come. Objective This study aims to…
When smartphones, applications (a.k.a, apps), and app stores have been widely adopted by the billions, an interesting debate emerges: whether and to what extent do device models influence the behaviors of their users? The answer to this…
The Android ecosystem is vulnerable to issues such as app repackaging, counterfeiting, and piracy, threatening both developers and users. To mitigate these risks, developers often employ code obfuscation techniques. However, while effective…
App stores include an increasing amount of user feedback in form of app ratings and reviews. Research and recently also tool vendors have proposed analytics and data mining solutions to leverage this feedback to developers and analysts,…
Given the importance of understanding the interaction between mobile devices and their users, app usage patterns have been studied in various contexts. However, prior work has not fully investigated longitudinal changes to app usage…
Problem: We address the challenge in responsible computing where an exploitable mobile app is misused by one app user (an abuser) against another user or bystander (victim). We introduce the idea of a misuse audit of apps as a way of…
This paper presents a large-scale analysis of fingerprinting-like behavior in the mobile application ecosystem. We take a market-based approach, focusing on third-party tracking as enabled by applications' common use of third-party SDKs.…
Never before has any OS been so popular as Android. Existing mobile phones are not simply devices for making phone calls and receiving SMS messages, but powerful communication and entertainment platforms for web surfing, social networking,…
Prior studies on mobile app analysis often analyze apps across different categories or focus on a small set of apps within a category. These studies either provide general insights for an entire app store which consists of millions of apps,…
Mobile applications (apps) have become deeply personal, constantly demanding access to privacy-sensitive information in exchange for more personalized user experiences. Such privacy-invading practices have generated major multidimensional…
Third party tracking allows companies to identify users and track their behaviour across multiple digital services. This paper presents an empirical study of the prevalence of third-party trackers on 959,000 apps from the US and UK Google…