Related papers: A Longitudinal Study of Google Play
Application markets provide a communication channel between app developers and their end-users in form of app reviews, which allow users to provide feedback about the apps. Although security and privacy in mobile apps are one of the biggest…
App markets have evolved into highly competitive and dynamic environments for developers. While the traditional app life cycle involves incremental updates for feature enhancements and issue resolution, some apps deviate from this norm by…
Contemporary mobile applications (apps) are designed to track, use, and share users' data, often without their consent, which results in potential privacy and transparency issues. To investigate whether mobile apps have always been…
The Google Play marketplace has introduced the Data Safety section to improve transparency regarding how mobile applications (apps) collect, share, and protect user data. This mechanism requires developers to disclose privacy and…
We present the results of the first large-scale study into Android markets that offer modified or modded apps: apps whose features and functionality have been altered by a third-party. We analyse over 146k (thousand) apps obtained from 13…
Privacy concerns have long been expressed around smart devices, and the concerns around Android apps have been studied by many past works. Over the past 10 years, we have crawled and scraped data for almost 1.9 million apps, and also stored…
The value of mobile apps is traditionally measured by metrics such as the number of downloads, installations, or user ratings. A problem with these measures is that they reflect actual usage at most indirectly. Indeed, analytic companies…
In the appstore-centric ecosystem, app developers have an urgent requirement to optimize their release strategy to maximize the success opportunity of their apps. To address this problem, we introduce an approach to assisting developers to…
There are over 1.2 million applications on the Google Play store today with a large number of competing applications for any given use or function. This creates challenges for users in selecting the right application. Moreover, some of the…
Access to privacy-sensitive information on Android is a growing concern in the mobile community. Albeit Google Play recently introduced some privacy guidelines, it is still an open problem to soundly verify whether apps actually comply with…
Large software organizations such as Facebook or Netflix, who otherwise make daily or even hourly releases of their web applications using continuous delivery, have had to invest heavily into a customized release strategy for their mobile…
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…
Although there are over 1,600,000 third-party Android apps in the Google Play Store, little has been conclusively shown about how their individual (and collective) permission usage has evolved over time. Recently, Android 6 overhauled the…
Android applications are frequently plagiarized or repackaged, and software obfuscation is a recommended protection against these practices. However, there is very little data on the overall rates of app obfuscation, the techniques used, or…
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,…
The digital age has brought a world of opportunity to children. Connectivity can be a game-changer for some of the world's most marginalized children. However, while legislatures around the world have enacted regulations to protect…
With the popularity of mobile devices, mobile applications have become an essential part of people's lives. To provide secure mobile application download channels for users, various modern app markets are maintained by different companies.…
This paper reports a large-scale study that aims to understand how mobile application (app) vulnerabilities are associated with software libraries. We analyze both free and paid apps. Studying paid apps was quite meaningful because it…
The Android market is a place where developers offer paid and-or free apps to users. Free apps are interesting to users because they can try them immediately without incurring a monetary cost. However, free apps often have limited features…
Fraudulent behaviors in Google Android app market fuel search rank abuse and malware proliferation. We present FairPlay, a novel system that uncovers both malware and search rank fraud apps, by picking out trails that fraudsters leave…