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The Android ecosystem faces a notable challenge known as fragmentation, which denotes the extensive diversity within the system. This issue is mainly related to differences in system versions, device hardware specifications, and…
China is currently the country with the largest number of Android smartphone users. We use a combination of static and dynamic code analysis techniques to study the data transmitted by the preinstalled system apps on Android smartphones…
The difficulty of large scale monitoring of app markets affects our understanding of their dynamics. This is particularly true for dimensions such as app update frequency, control and pricing, the impact of developer actions on app…
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…
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…
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…
The transparency and privacy behavior of mobile browsers has remained widely unexplored by the research community. In fact, as opposed to regular Android apps, mobile browsers may present contradicting privacy behaviors. On the one end,…
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…
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…
Third-party security apps are an integral part of the Android app ecosystem. Many users install them as an extra layer of protection for their devices. There are hundreds of such security apps, both free and paid in Google Play Store and…
The prevalence of smart mobile devices has promoted the popularity of mobile applications (a.k.a. apps). Supporting mobility has become a promising trend in software engineering research. This article presents an empirical study of…
The open-source nature of the Android OS makes it possible for manufacturers to ship custom versions of the OS along with a set of pre-installed apps, often for product differentiation. Some device vendors have recently come under scrutiny…
Android is the most popular operating system with billions of active devices. Unfortunately, its popularity and openness makes it attractive for unwanted apps, i.e., malware and potentially unwanted programs (PUP). In Android, app…
The packaging model of Android apps requires the entire code necessary for the execution of an app to be shipped into one single apk file. Thus, an analysis of Android apps often visits code which is not part of the functionality delivered…
Privacy in apps is a topic of widespread interest because many apps collect and share large amounts of highly sensitive information. In response, China introduced a range of new data protection laws over recent years, notably the Personal…
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 phones enable the collection of a wealth of private information, from unique identifiers (e.g., email addresses), to a user's location, to their text messages. This information can be harvested by apps and sent to third parties,…
Bystander privacy in smart homes has been widely studied in Western contexts, yet it remains underexplored in non-Western countries such as China. In this study, we analyze 49 Chinese smart home apps using a mixed-methods approach,…
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…
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…