Related papers: Demystifying Removed Apps in iOS App Store
Due to U.S. sanctions and strict internet censorship, Iranian iOS users are barred from accessing the Apple App Store and developer services. In response, despite violating Apple's developer terms, a thriving underground ecosystem of…
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…
Android is among the popular platforms running on millions of smart devices, like smartphones and tablets, whose widespread adoption is seen as an opportunity for spreading malware. Adding malicious payloads to cracked applications, often…
Mobile applications (apps) have become an essential part of everyday life, offering convenient access to services such as banking, healthcare, and shopping. With these apps handling sensitive personal and financial data, ensuring their…
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…
The ubiquity of mobile applications has increased dramatically in recent years, opening up new opportunities for cyber attackers and heightening security concerns in the mobile ecosystem. As a result, researchers and practitioners have…
Tracking is a highly privacy-invasive data collection practice that has been ubiquitous in mobile apps for many years due to its role in supporting advertising-based revenue models. In response, Apple introduced two significant changes with…
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…
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…
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…
The number of applications on online mobile application stores is increasing at a rapid rate. Smart-phones are used by a wide range of people varying in age, and also in the ability to use a smart phone. With the increasing dependency on…
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…
Dating apps for mobile devices, one popular GeoSocial app category, are growing increasingly popular. These apps encourage the sharing of more personal information than conventional social media apps, including continuous location data.…
The apps installed on a smartphone can reveal much information about a user, such as their medical conditions, sexual orientation, or religious beliefs. Additionally, the presence or absence of particular apps on a smartphone can inform an…
Software testing is an important phase in the software development life-cycle because it helps in identifying bugs in a software system before it is shipped into the hand of its end users. There are numerous studies on how developers test…
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…
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…
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…
Factors such as app stores or platform choices heavily affect functional and non-functional mobile app requirements. We surveyed 45 companies and interviewed ten experts to explore how factors that impact mobile app requirements are…
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,…