A Longitudinal Study of Google Play

TL;DR

This longitudinal study analyzes Google Play Store data over six months, revealing patterns in app updates, developer dominance, pricing, and stability, with implications for market monitoring and security.

Contribution

It provides a detailed temporal analysis of app dynamics on Google Play, highlighting update behaviors, developer influence, and market stability insights.

Findings

Many apps are not updated during the monitoring period.

A few developers control most app downloads.

Higher-ranked apps are more stable in top lists.

Abstract

The difficulty of large scale monitoring of app markets affects our understanding of their dynamics. This is particularly true for dimensions such as app update frequency, control and pricing, the impact of developer actions on app popularity, as well as coveted membership in top app lists. In this paper we perform a detailed temporal analysis on two datasets we have collected from the Google Play Store, one consisting of 160,000 apps and the other of 87,223 newly released apps. We have monitored and collected data about these apps over more than 6 months. Our results show that a high number of these apps have not been updated over the monitoring interval. Moreover, these apps are controlled by a few developers that dominate the total number of app downloads. We observe that infrequently updated apps significantly impact the median app price. However, a changing app price does not correlate with the download count. Furthermore, we show that apps that attain higher ranks have better stability in top app lists. We show that app market analytics can help detect emerging threat vectors, and identify search rank fraud and even malware. Further, we discuss the research implications of app market analytics on improving developer and user experiences.