Related papers: Misbehavior in Mobile Application Markets

Millions of mobile apps have been available through various app markets. Although most app markets have enforced a number of automated or even manual mechanisms to vet each app before it is released to the market, thousands of low-quality…

TouchDevelop is a new programming environment that allows users to create applications on mobile devices. Applications created with TouchDevelop have continued to grow in popularity since TouchDevelop was first released to public in 2011.…

Expecting the shipment of 1 billion Android devices in 2017, cyber criminals have naturally extended their vicious activities towards Google's mobile operating system. With an estimated number of 700 new Android applications released every…

During last ten years, the number of smartphones and mobile applications has been constantly growing. Android, iOS and Windows Mobile are three mobile platforms that cover almost all smartphones in the world in 2017. Developing a mobile app…

The industry for children's apps is thriving at the cost of children's privacy: these apps routinely disclose children's data to multiple data trackers and ad networks. As children spend increasing time online, such exposure accumulates to…

Android-based smart devices are exponentially growing, and due to the ubiquity of the Internet, these devices are globally connected to the different devices/networks. Its popularity, attractive features, and mobility make malware creator…

Fairness is one of the socio-technical concerns that must be addressed in software systems. Considering the popularity of mobile software applications (apps) among a wide range of individuals worldwide, mobile apps with unfair behaviors and…

Dark patterns in online commerce, especially deceptive user interface designs for apps and websites, undermine consumer autonomy and distort online markets. Although sometimes deception is intentional, the complex app development process…

Driven by the popularity of the Android system, Android app markets enjoy a booming prosperity in recent years. One critical problem for modern Android app markets is how to prevent apps that are going to receive low ratings from reaching…

Android is among the popular platforms running on millions of smart devices, like smartphones and tablets, whose widespread adoption is seen as an opportunity for spreading malware. Adding malicious payloads to cracked applications, often…

While there have been various studies towards Android apps and their development, there is limited discussion of the broader class of apps that fall in the fake area. Fake apps and their development are distinct from official apps and…

Mobile apps provide various critical services, such as banking, communication, and healthcare. To this end, they have access to our personal information and have the ability to perform actions on our behalf. Hence, securing mobile apps is…

Mobile app development has become the front line in software engineering. With the recent years many smartphone platforms have grew including but not limited to webOS, blackberry os, Tizen, android, and iOS. The coexistence of these…

Intense competition in the mobile apps market means it is important to maintain high levels of app reliability to avoid losing users. Yet despite its importance, app reliability is underexplored in the research literature. To address this…

There are over one million apps on Google Play Store and over half a million publishers. Having such a huge number of apps and developers can pose a challenge to app users and new publishers on the store. Discovering apps can be challenging…

On mobile phones, users and developers use apps official marketplaces serving as repositories of apps. The Google Play Store and Apple Store are the official marketplaces of Android and Apple products which offer more than a million apps.…

"Incentivized" advertising platforms allow mobile app developers to acquire new users by directly paying users to install and engage with mobile apps (e.g., create an account, make in-app purchases). Incentivized installs are banned by the…

Prior works have shown that the list of apps installed by a user reveal a lot about user interests and behavior. These works rely on the semantics of the installed apps and show that various user traits could be learnt automatically using…

We study four promotions offered on Apple's mobile app store that vary in user exposure, price discount and redemption procedure. We find that promotions that are full-price discounted and digital (i.e., the redemption procedure is a few…

[Background] Web communication is universal in cyberspace, and security risks in this domain are devastating. [Aims] We analyzed the prevalence of six security smells in mobile app servers, and we investigated the consequence of these…