Related papers: Understanding Incentivized Mobile App Installs on …
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…
In an effort to combat ad annoyance in mobile apps, publishers have introduced a new ad format called "Incentivized Advertising" or "Rewarded Advertising", whereby users receive rewards in exchange for watching ads. There is much debate in…
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…
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…
We have carefully instrumented a large portion of the population living in a university graduate dormitory by giving participants Android smart phones running our sensing software. In this paper, we propose the novel problem of predicting…
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…
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…
In-app advertisements have become a major revenue source for app developers in the mobile app ecosystem. Ad libraries play an integral part in this ecosystem as app developers integrate these libraries into their apps to display ads. In…
Prior spending shutoff experiments in search advertising have found that paid ads cannibalize organic traffic. But it is unclear whether the same is true for other high volume advertising channels like mobile display advertising. We…
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.…
Online app search optimization (ASO) platforms that provide bulk installs and fake reviews for paying app developers in order to fraudulently boost their search rank in app stores, were shown to employ diverse and complex strategies that…
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…
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…
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…
"App stores" are online software stores where end users may browse, purchase, download, and install software applications. By far, the best known app stores are associated with mobile platforms, such as Google Play for Android and Apple's…
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…
In my dissertation, I will analyze how the product market position of a mobile app affects its pricing strategies, which in turn impacts an app's monetization process. Using natural language processing and k-mean clustering on apps' text…
Download fraud is a prevalent threat in mobile App markets, where fraudsters manipulate the number of downloads of Apps via various cheating approaches. Purchased fake downloads can mislead recommendation and search algorithms and further…
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…