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Fairness is one of the socio-technical concerns that must be addressed in software systems. Considering the popularity of mobile software applications (apps) among a wide range of individuals worldwide, mobile apps with unfair behaviors and…
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…
Voice assistants have become quite popular lately while in parallel they are an important part of smarthome systems. Through their voice assistants, users can perform various tasks, control other devices and enjoy third party services. The…
In today's mobile application marketplace, the ability of consumers to make informed choices regarding their privacy is extremely limited. Consumers largely rely on privacy policies and app permission mechanisms, but these do an inadequate…
Context: Post-release user feedback plays an integral role in improving software quality and informing new features. Given its growing importance, feedback concerning security enhancements is particularly noteworthy. In considering the…
Contact-tracing apps have potential benefits in helping health authorities to act swiftly to halt the spread of COVID-19. However, their effectiveness is heavily dependent on their installation rate, which may be influenced by people's…
Mobile apps are predominantly integrated with cloud services to benefit from enhanced functionalities. Adopting authentication using secrets such as API keys is crucial to ensure secure mobile-cloud interactions. However, developers often…
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.…
Powered by the rising popularity of deep learning techniques on smartphones, on-device deep learning models are being used in vital fields like finance, social media, and driving assistance. Because of the transparency of the Android…
Android apps collecting data from users must comply with legal frameworks to ensure data protection. This requirement has become even more important since the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by the European…
Contact tracing apps have become one of the main approaches to control and slow down the spread of COVID-19 and ease up lockdown measures. While these apps can be very effective in stopping the transmission chain and saving lives, their…
Nowadays the app-in-app paradigm is becoming increasingly popular, and sub-apps have become an important form of mobile applications. WeChat, the leading app-in-app platform, provides millions of sub-apps that can be used for online…
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…
With the onset of COVID-19, governments worldwide planned to develop and deploy contact tracing (CT) apps to help speed up the contact tracing process. However, experts raised concerns about the long-term privacy and security implications…
Mobile health apps hold great potential for promoting children's health and wellbeing. However, there is limited understanding of how these technologies are currently designed to support children with their health concerns or wellness…
Smartphone manufacturer provided default features (e.g., default location services, iCloud, Google Assistant, ad tracking) enhance the usability and extend the functionality of these devices. Prior studies have highlighted smartphone…
The Android ecosystem is vulnerable to issues such as app repackaging, counterfeiting, and piracy, threatening both developers and users. To mitigate these risks, developers often employ code obfuscation techniques. However, while effective…
Contact tracing is a very powerful method to implement and enforce social distancing to avoid spreading of infectious diseases. The traditional approach of contact tracing is time consuming, manpower intensive, dangerous and prone to error…
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,…
While the literature on permissions from the end-user perspective is rich, there is a lack of empirical research on why developers request permissions, their conceptualization of permissions, and how their perspectives compare with…