Haoyu Wang
Jason Hong
ABSTRACT
With the prevalence of smartphones, app markets such as Apple App Store and Google Play has become the center stage in the mobile app ecosystem, with millions of apps developed by tens of thousands of app developers in each major market. This paper presents a study of the mobile app ecosystem from the perspective of app developers. Based on over one million Android apps and 320,000 developers from Google Play, we analyzed the Android app ecosystem from different aspects. Our analysis shows that while over half of the developers have released only one app in the market, many of them have released hundreds of apps. We classified developers into different groups based on the number of apps they have released, and compared their characteristics. Specially, we have analyzed the group of aggressive developers who have released more than 50 apps, trying to understand how and why they create so many apps. We also investigated the privacy behaviors of app developers, showing that some developers have a habit of producing apps with low privacy ratings. Our study shows that understanding the behavior of mobile developers can be helpful to not only other app developers, but also to app markets and mobile users.
- B. Andow, A. Nadkarni, B. Bassett, W. Enck, and T. Xie. A study of grayware on Google Play. In Proceedings of Workshop on Mobile Security Technologies, 2016.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- AndroidLib, 2016. http://www.androlib.com/.Google Scholar
- Android Rank, 2016. http://www.androidrank.org/.Google Scholar
- App Annie Forecast, 2016. https://www.appannie.com/cn/landing/forecast/.Google Scholar
- AppBrain, 2016. http://www.appbrain.com/.Google Scholar
- Wikipedia App Store(iOS), 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(iOS).Google Scholar
- R. Baeza-Yates, D. Jiang, F. Silvestri, and B. Harrison. Predicting the next app that you are going to use. In Proceedings of WSDM '15, pages 285--294, 2015. Google ScholarDigital Library
- R. Balebako, A. Marsh, J. Lin, J. Hong, and L. Cranor. The privacy and security behaviors of smartphone app developers. In Proceedings of the 2014 Workshop on Usable Security (USEC), 2014.Google ScholarCross Ref
- E. Bello-Ogunu and M. Shehab. Permitme: integrating Android permissioning support in the IDE. In Proceedings of the 2014 Workshop on Eclipse Technology eXchange, pages 15--20. ACM, 2014. Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Chakradeo, B. Reaves, P. Traynor, and W. Enck. Mast: Triage for market-scale mobile malware analysis. In Proceedings of WiSec'13, pages 13--24. Google ScholarDigital Library
- N. Chen, J. Lin, S. C. H. Hoi, X. Xiao, and B. Zhang. Ar-miner: Mining informative reviews for developers from mobile app marketplace. In Proceedings of ICSE '14, pages 767--778, 2014. Google ScholarDigital Library
- E. Chin, A. P. Felt, V. Sekar, and D. Wagner. Measuring user confidence in smartphone security and privacy. In Proceedings of SOUPS '12. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Detecting libraries in Android apps, 2016. http://radar.pkuos.org/.Google Scholar
- A demographic and business model analysis of today's app developer, 2016. http://www.doyoubuzz.com/var/f/xh/gJ/xhgJP6i_3R7alpfo5mCrKD4wLVByQzFvtIONbUGMcuX2AEWTZ-.pdf.Google Scholar
- N. d'Heureuse, F. Huici, M. Arumaithurai, M. Ahmed, K. Papagiannaki, and S. Niccolini. What's app?: A wide-scale measurement study of smart phone markets. SIGMOBILE Mob. Comput. Commun. Rev., 16(2), 2012. Google ScholarDigital Library
- W. Enck, P. Gilbert, B.-G. Chun, L. P. Cox, J. Jung, P. McDaniel, and A. N. Sheth. Taintdroid: An information-flow tracking system for realtime privacy monitoring on smartphones. In Proceedings of OSDI '10. Google ScholarDigital Library
- W. Enck, D. Octeau, P. McDaniel, and S. Chaudhuri. A study of Android application security. In Proceedings of the 20th USENIX Conference on Security, 2011. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. P. Felt, K. Greenwood, and D. Wagner. The effectiveness of application permissions. In Proceedings of WebApps'11. Google ScholarDigital Library
- B. Fu, J. Lin, L. Li, C. Faloutsos, J. Hong, and N. Sadeh. Why people hate your app: Making sense of user feedback in a mobile app store. In Proceedings of KDD '13, pages 1276--1284, 2013. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Wikipedia Google Play, 2016. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Play.Google Scholar
- M. Grace, Y. Zhou, Q. Zhang, S. Zou, and X. Jiang. Riskranker: Scalable and accurate zero-day Android malware detection. In Proceedings of MobiSys'12, pages 281--294, 2012. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Harman, A. Al-Subaihin, Y. Jia, W. Martin, F. Sarro, and Y. Zhang. Mobile app and app store analysis, testing and optimisation. In Proceedings of MOBILESoft'16, pages 243--244, 2016. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Holzer and J. Ondrus. Mobile application market: A developer's perspective. Telematics and Informatics, 28(1):22--31, 2011. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Karatzoglou, L. Baltrunas, K. Church, and M. Böhmer. Climbing the app wall: Enabling mobile app discovery through context-aware recommendations. In Proceedings of CIKM '12, pages 2527--2530. Google ScholarDigital Library
- H. Khalid, E. Shihab, M. Nagappan, and A. E. Hassan. What do mobile app users complain about? IEEE Software, 32(3):70--77, 2015.Google ScholarDigital Library
- H. Li, W. Ai, X. Liu, J. Tang, G. Huang, F. Feng, and Q. Mei. Voting with their feet: Inferring user preferences from app management activities. In Proceedings of WWW '16, pages 1351--1362. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Y. Li, Y. Guo, and X. Chen. Peruim: Understanding mobile application privacy with permission-ui mapping. In Proceedings of UbiComp '16, pages 682--693. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Lin, S. Amini, J. I. Hong, N. Sadeh, J. Lindqvist, and J. Zhang. Expectation and purpose: Understanding users' mental models of mobile app privacy through crowdsourcing. In Proceedings of UbiComp '12, pages 501--510. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Lin, B. Liu, N. Sadeh, and J. I. Hong. Modeling users mobile app privacy preferences: Restoring usability in a sea of permission settings. In Proceedings of SOUPS '14, pages 199--212.Google Scholar
- M. Liu, H. Wang, Y. Guo, and J. Hong. Identifying and analyzing the privacy of apps for kids. In Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (HotMobile '16), pages 105--110, 2016. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Z. Ma, H. Wang, Y. Guo, and X. Chen. Libradar: Fast and accurate detection of third-party libraries in Android apps. In Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion (ICSE '16), pages 653--656, 2016. Google ScholarDigital Library
- There are 12 million mobile developers worldwide, 2016. http://www.businessofapps.com/12-million-mobile-developers-worldwide-nearly-half-develop-android-first/.Google Scholar
- Number of available apps in Google Play, 2016. https://www.statista.com/statistics/266210/number-of-available-applications-in-the-google-play-store/.Google Scholar
- Privacy Grade, 2016. http://privacygrade.org/.Google Scholar
- V. Rastogi, Y. Chen, and W. Enck. Appsplayground: Automatic security analysis of smartphone applications. In Proceedings of CODASPY '13, pages 209--220, 2013. Google ScholarDigital Library
- F. Sarro, A. A. Al-Subaihin, M. Harman, Y. Jia, W. Martin, and Y. Zhang. Feature lifecycles as they spread, migrate, remain, and die in app stores. In Proceedings of RE'15, pages 76--85.Google Scholar
- S. Seneviratne, H. Kolamunna, and A. Seneviratne. A measurement study of tracking in paid mobile applications. In Proceedings of WiSec'15, pages 7:1--7:6, 2015. Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Seneviratne, A. Seneviratne, P. Mohapatra, and A. Mahanti. Your installed apps reveal your gender and more! SIGMOBILE Mob. Comput. Commun. Rev., 18(3):55--61, 2015. Google ScholarDigital Library
- N. Viennot, E. Garcia, and J. Nieh. A measurement study of Google Play. In Proceedings of SIGMETRICS'14, pages 221--233, 2014. Google ScholarDigital Library
- H. Wang, Y. Guo, Z. Ma, and X. Chen. Wukong: A scalable and accurate two-phase approach to Android app clone detection. In Proceedings of ISSTA '15, pages 71--82. Google ScholarDigital Library
- H. Wang, Y. Guo, Z. Tang, G. Bai, and X. Chen. Reevaluating Android permission gaps with static and dynamic analysis. In Proceedings of GLOBECOM '15.Google Scholar
- H. Wang, J. I. Hong, and Y. Guo. Using text mining to infer the purpose of permission use in mobile apps. In Proceedings of UbiComp '15, pages 1107--1118. Google ScholarDigital Library
- H. Wang, Z. Wang, Y. Guo, and X. Chen. Detecting repackaged Android applications based on code clone detection technique. In SCIENCE CHINA Information Sciences, volume 44(1), pages 142--157, 2014.Google Scholar
- Worldwide mobile app revenues in 2015, 2015 and 2020 (in billion U.S. dollars), 2016. https://www.statista.com/statistics/269025/worldwide-mobile-app-revenue-forecast/.Google Scholar
- Y. Zhang, M. Yang, B. Xu, Z. Yang, G. Gu, P. Ning, X. S. Wang, and B. Zang. Vetting undesirable behaviors in Android apps with permission use analysis. In Proceedings of CCS'13, pages 611--622. Google ScholarDigital Library
- N. Zhong and F. Michahelles. Google Play is not a long tail market: An empirical analysis of app adoption on the Google Play app market. In Proceedings of SAC '13, pages 499--504. Google ScholarDigital Library
- W. Zhou, Y. Zhou, X. Jiang, and P. Ning. Detecting repackaged smartphone applications in third-party Android marketplaces. In Proceedings of CODASPY '12. Google ScholarDigital Library
- X. Zhou, S. Demetriou, D. He, M. Naveed, X. Pan, X. Wang, C. A. Gunter, and K. Nahrstedt. Identity, location, disease and more: Inferring your secrets from Android public resources. In Proceedings of CCS '13, pages 1017--1028. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Y. Zhou, X. Zhang, X. Jiang, and V. W. Freeh. Taming information-stealing smartphone applications (on Android). In Proceedings of TRUST '11, pages 93--107. Google ScholarDigital Library
- H. Zhu, H. Xiong, Y. Ge, and E. Chen. Mobile app recommendations with security and privacy awareness. In Proceedings of KDD'14, pages 951--960. Google ScholarDigital Library
- K. Zhu, X. He, B. Xiang, L. Zhang, and A. Pattavina. How dangerous are your smartphones? app usage recommendation with privacy preserving. Mobile Information Systems, 2016:6804379:1--6804379:10, 2016.Google ScholarCross Ref
Index Terms
- An Explorative Study of the Mobile App Ecosystem from App Developers' Perspective
Recommendations
Understanding the Evolution of Mobile App Ecosystems: A Longitudinal Measurement Study of Google Play
WWW '19: The World Wide Web ConferenceThe continuing expansion of mobile app ecosystems has attracted lots of efforts from the research community. However, although a large number of research studies have focused on analyzing the corpus of mobile apps and app markets, little is known at a ...
Measurement, Modeling, and Analysis of the Mobile App Ecosystem
Mobile applications (apps) have been gaining popularity due to the advances in mobile technologies and the large increase in the number of mobile users. Consequently, several app distribution platforms, which provide a new way for developing, ...
Beyond Google Play: A Large-Scale Comparative Study of Chinese Android App Markets
IMC '18: Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference 2018China 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 app stores ...
Comments