Related papers: A Longitudinal Study of Google Play
Release planning for mobile apps has recently become an area of active research. Prior research in this area concentrated on the analysis of release notes and on tracking user reviews to support app evolution with issue trackers. However,…
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…
Smartphone technology has drastically improved over the past decade. These improvements have seen the creation of specialized health applications, which offer consumers a range of health-related activities such as tracking and checking…
With the rapid growth of mobile apps, users' concerns about their privacy have become increasingly prominent. Android app logs serve as crucial computer resources, aiding developers in debugging and monitoring the status of Android apps,…
With the requirements and emphases on privacy transparency placed by regulations such as GDPR and CCPA, the Google Play Store requires Android developers to more responsibly communicate their apps' privacy practices to potential users by…
Mobile phones and tablets have become the most widely used computing devices, with a large predominance of the Android platform. As a natural evolution, the development of Android applications has surged and has become a major field of…
While many studies have looked at privacy properties of the Android and Google Play app ecosystem, comparatively much less is known about iOS and the Apple App Store, the most widely used ecosystem in the US. At the same time, there is…
Mobile app stores are the key distributors of mobile applications. They regularly apply vetting processes to the deployed apps. Yet, some of these vetting processes might be inadequate or applied late. The late removal of applications might…
App stores are highly competitive markets, sometimes offering dozens of apps for a single use case. Unexpected app changes such as a feature removal might incite even loyal users to explore alternative apps. Sentiment analysis tools can…
The ability to identify the author responsible for a given software object is critical for many research studies and for enhancing software transparency and accountability. However, as opposed to other application markets like iOS,…
This paper investigates changes over time in the behavior of Android ad libraries. Taking a sample of 100,000 apps, we extract and classify the ad libraries. By considering the release dates of the applications that use a specific ad…
The proliferation of mobile applications and the subsequent sharing of personal data with service and application providers have given rise to substantial privacy concerns. Application marketplaces have introduced mechanisms to conform to…
While mobile app evolution has been widely studied, geographical variation in app behavior remains largely unexplored. This paper presents a large-scale study of location-based Android app differentiation, uncovering two important and…
Privacy regulations protect and promote the privacy of individuals by requiring mobile apps to provide a privacy policy that explains what personal information is collected and how these apps process this information. However, developers…
Mobile app distribution platforms such as Google Play Store allow users to share their feedback about downloaded apps in the form of a review comment and a corresponding star rating. Typically, the star rating ranges from one to five stars,…
Privacy, security, and accessibility, like ethical concerns in mobile applications (a.k.a. apps), commonly subsumed under non-functional requirements, are generally reported by users through app reviews available in app stores. However,…
Google Play's policy forbids the use of incentivized installs, ratings, and reviews to manipulate the placement of apps. However, there still exist apps that incentivize installs for other apps on the platform. To understand how…
With mobile shopping surging in popularity, people are spending ever more money on digital purchases through their mobile devices and phones. However, few large-scale studies of mobile shopping exist. In this paper we analyze a large data…
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…
Online advertisers and analytics services (or trackers), are constantly tracking users activities as they access web services either through browsers or a mobile apps. Numerous tools such as browser plugins and specialized mobile apps have…