Related papers: A Longitudinal Study of Google Play
There is little information from independent sources in the public domain about mobile malware infection rates. The only previous independent estimate (0.0009%) [12], was based on indirect measurements obtained from domain name resolution…
The pervasiveness of the Android operating system, with the availability of applications almost for everything, is readily accessible in the official Google play store or a dozen alternative third-party markets. Additionally, the vital role…
Many phone vendors use Android as their underlying OS, but often extend it to add new functionality and to make it compatible with their specific phones. When a new version of Android is released, phone vendors need to merge or re-apply…
With the continuous growth in the usage of Android apps, ensuring their security has become critically important. An increasing number of malicious apps adopt anti-analysis techniques to evade security measures. Although some research has…
Human values such as honesty, social responsibility, fairness, privacy, and the like are things considered important by individuals and society. Software systems, including mobile software applications (apps), may ignore or violate such…
Ubiquitous technologies such as mobile software applications (mobile apps) have a tremendous influence on the evolution of the social, cultural, economic, and political facets of life in society. Mobile apps fulfil many practical purposes…
Smartphones, the devices we carry everywhere with us, are being heavily tracked and have undoubtedly become a major threat to our privacy. As "tracking the trackers" has become a necessity, various static and dynamic analysis tools have…
Context: Smart TVs have become one of the most popular television types. Many app developers and service providers have designed TV versions for their smartphone applications. Despite the extensive studies on mobile app analysis, its TV…
Vendors in the Android ecosystem typically customize their devices by modifying Android Open Source Project (AOSP) code, adding in-house developed proprietary software, and pre-installing third-party applications. However, research has…
With millions of apps that can be downloaded from official or third-party market, Android has become one of the most popular mobile platforms today. These apps help people in all kinds of ways and thus have access to lots of user's data…
Mobile applications, often simply called "apps", are increasingly widespread, and we use them daily to perform a number of activities. Like all software, apps must be adequately tested to gain confidence that they behave correctly.…
As mobile applications (apps) become ubiquitous in everyday life, it is crucial for developers to prioritize accessibility for users with diverse abilities. While previous research has identified widespread accessibility issues and raised…
Contact tracing has historically been used to retard the spread of infectious diseases, but if it is exercised by hand in large-scale, it is known to be a resource-intensive and quite deficient process. Nowadays, digital contact tracing has…
Parental control applications, software tools designed to manage and monitor children's online activities, serve as essential safeguards for parents in the digital age. However, their usage has sparked concerns about security and privacy…
Following OpenAI's introduction of GPTs, a surge in GPT apps has led to the launch of dedicated LLM app stores. Nevertheless, given its debut, there is a lack of sufficient understanding of this new ecosystem. To fill this gap, this paper…
Regulators and browsers increasingly restrict user tracking to protect users' privacy online. In two large-scale empirical studies, we study the economic implications for publishers relying on selling advertising space to finance their…
Android app developers extensively employ code reuse, integrating many third-party libraries into their apps. While such integration is practical for developers, it can be challenging for static analyzers to achieve scalability and…
In the mobile app ecosystem, developers receive ad revenue by placing ads in their apps and releasing them for free. While there is evidence that users do not like ads, we do not know what are the aspects of ads that users dislike nor if…
Apple introduced privacy labels in Dec. 2020 as a way for developers to report the privacy behaviors of their apps. While Apple does not validate labels, they also require developers to provide a privacy policy, which offers an important…
Android devices are equipped with many pre-installed applications which have the capability of tracking and monitoring users. Although applications coming pre-installed pose a great danger to user security and privacy, they have received…