Related papers: ModZoo: A Large-Scale Study of Modded Android Apps…
In the mobile app ecosystem, developers receive ad revenue by placing ads in their apps and releasing them for free. While there is evidence that users do not like ads, we do not know what are the aspects of ads that users dislike nor if…
Android's permission system is designed to balance usability with informed consent, yet two legacy mechanisms still undermine that balance in Android 16: (i) permission groups that silently auto-grant new permissions within a group after a…
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…
A wide variety of smartphone applications today rely on third-party advertising services, which provide libraries that are linked into the hosting application. This situation is undesirable for both the application author and the…
The age of technology has created a huge market for smartphones and Apps usage and a new generation has been created based on knowledge sharing. Now knowledge has been made easily accessible by Apps but; are users even aware of the…
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…
Expecting the shipment of 1 billion Android devices in 2017, cyber criminals have naturally extended their vicious activities towards Google's mobile operating system. With an estimated number of 700 new Android applications released every…
Fraudulent behaviors in Google Android app market fuel search rank abuse and malware proliferation. We present FairPlay, a novel system that uncovers both malware and search rank fraud apps, by picking out trails that fraudsters leave…
The industry for children's apps is thriving at the cost of children's privacy: these apps routinely disclose children's data to multiple data trackers and ad networks. As children spend increasing time online, such exposure accumulates to…
Android apps are built on APIs that abstract core Android system functionalities. These APIs are officially documented in multiple files distributed with the Android source code or SDK, which we collectively refer to as Android API Lists…
Ads are an important revenue source for mobile app development, especially for free apps, whose expense can be compensated by ad revenue. The ad benefits also carry with costs. For example, too many ads can interfere the user experience,…
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 apps can hold secret strings of themselves such as cloud service credentials or encryption keys. Leakage of such secret strings can induce unprecedented consequences like monetary losses or leakage of user private information. In…
Mobile mental health applications are seen as a promising way to fulfill the growing need for mental health care. Although there are more than ten thousand mental health apps available on app marketplaces, such as Google Play and Apple App…
End-users seldom read verbose privacy policies, leading app stores like Google Play to mandate simplified data safety declarations as a user-friendly alternative. However, these self-declared disclosures often contradict the full privacy…
Zoom serves millions of users daily and allows third-party developers to integrate their apps with the Zoom client and reach those users. So far, these apps' privacy and security aspects, which can access rich audio-visual data (among…
A growing concern with advertisement libraries on Android is their ability to exfiltrate personal information from their host applications. While previous work has looked at the libraries' abilities to measure private information on their…
In this paper, we seek to better understand Android obfuscation and depict a holistic view of the usage of obfuscation through a large-scale investigation in the wild. In particular, we focus on four popular obfuscation approaches:…
While mobile app evolution has been widely studied, geographical variation in app behavior remains largely unexplored. This paper presents a large-scale study of location-based Android app differentiation, uncovering two important and…
Game developers cannot always meet the growing and changing needs of the gaming community, due to the often already overloaded schedules of developers. So-called modders can potentially assist game developers with addressing gamers' needs.…