Identifying diverse usage behaviors of smartphone apps

TLDR

Smartphone users increasingly rely on apps as gateways to Internet services, with app marketplaces offering hundreds of thousands of apps and a growing diversity of devices, yet little is known about how, where, and when these apps are used at scale. This study aims to fill that gap by analyzing national‑level app usage using anonymized network data from a major U.S. cellular carrier. The authors identify traffic from distinct marketplace apps through HTTP signature detection and aggregate the data to examine spatial and temporal prevalence, locality, and inter‑app correlation.

Abstract

Smartphone users are increasingly shifting to using apps as "gateways" to Internet services rather than traditional web browsers. App marketplaces for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone platforms have made it attractive for developers to deploy apps and easy for users to discover and start using many network-enabled apps quickly. For example, it was recently reported that the iOS AppStore has more than 350K apps and more than 10 billion downloads. Furthermore, the appearance of tablets and mobile devices with other form factors, which also use these marketplaces, has increased the diversity in apps and their user population. Despite the increasing importance of apps as gateways to network services, we have a much sparser understanding of how, where, and when they are used compared to traditional web services, particularly at scale. This paper takes a first step in addressing this knowledge gap by presenting results on app usage at a national level using anonymized network measurements from a tier-1 cellular carrier in the U.S. We identify traffic from distinct marketplace apps based on HTTP signatures and present aggregate results on their spatial and temporal prevalence, locality, and correlation.