Android market reconstruction and analysis

Abstract

With the rise in both personal and official smartphone use by the military, large scale application store analysis is an appealing idea, but until now there has been no real method of quickly accumulating a large library for analysis. In this paper we present a population study of permission and library use in Android apps, obtained from the Google Play Store. To accomplish this, we present a novel method for quickly reconnoitering a large database using a novel wordlist approach. Employing this method we compiled a library of over 700, 000 applications. By leveraging program analysis and data mining techniques, we analyzed how permissions and libraries are used in real world settings on a population-wide level. From this we were able to make several claims about the health and apparently direction of the Android ecosystem.