Related papers: Demystifying Removed Apps in iOS App Store
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,…
Mobile applications (apps) have become deeply personal, constantly demanding access to privacy-sensitive information in exchange for more personalized user experiences. Such privacy-invading practices have generated major multidimensional…
Usage of mobile applications has become a part of our lives today, since every day we use our smartphones for communication, entertainment, business and education. High demand on apps has led to significant growth of supply, yet large offer…
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…
Mobile gaming apps are woven into children's daily lives. Given their ongoing cognitive and emotional development, children are especially vulnerable and depend on designs that safeguard their well-being. When apps feature manipulative…
A recently published pre-print titled 'GDPR and the Lost Generation of Innovative Apps' by Jan{\ss}en et al. observes that a third of apps on the Google Play Store disappeared from this app store around the introduction of the GDPR in May…
Despite continuous efforts to build and update network infrastructure, mobile devices in developing regions continue to be constrained by limited bandwidth. Unfortunately, this coincides with a period of unprecedented growth in the size of…
As social networking takes to the mobile world, smartphone apps provide users with ever-changing ways to interact with each other. Over the past couple of years, an increasing number of apps have entered the market offering end-to-end…
Android apps have become a valuable target for app modifiers and imitators due to its popularity and being trusted with highly sensitive data. Packers, on the other hand, protect apps from tampering with various anti-analysis techniques…
A recent report indicates that there is a new malicious app introduced every 4 seconds. This rapid malware distribution rate causes existing malware detection systems to fall far behind, allowing malicious apps to escape vetting efforts and…
Android is the most popular mobile operating system in the world, running on more than 70% of mobile devices. This implies a gigantic and very competitive market for Android apps. Being successful in such a market is far from trivial and…
Desktop browser extensions have long allowed users to improve their experience online and tackle widespread harms on websites. So far, no equivalent solution exists for mobile apps, despite the fact that individuals now spend significantly…
Dependency management systems are a critical component in software development, enabling projects to incorporate existing functionality efficiently. However, misconfigurations and malicious actors in these systems pose severe security…
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…
The competing nature of the app market motivates us to shift our focus on apps that provide similar functionalities and directly compete with each other (i.e., peer apps). In this work, we study the ratings and the review text of 100…
E-commerce mobile applications are central to global financial transactions, making their security and privacy crucial. In this study, we analyze 92 top-grossing Android e-commerce apps (58 U.S.-based and 34 international) using MobSF,…
Super apps are the cornerstones of modern digital life, embedding financial transactions into nearly every aspect of daily routine. The prevailing security paradigm for these platforms is overwhelmingly focused on pre-transaction…
Human values are an important aspect of life and should be supported in ubiquitous technologies such as mobile applications (apps). There has been a lot of focus on fixing certain kinds of violation of human values, especially privacy,…
An increasing number of mental health services are offered through mobile systems, a paradigm called mHealth. Although there is an unprecedented growth in the adoption of mHealth systems, partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, concerns about…
In-app advertising closely relates to app revenue. Reckless ad integration could adversely impact app reliability and user experience, leading to loss of income. It is very challenging to balance the ad revenue and user experience for app…