Detecting and Characterising Mobile App Metamorphosis in Google Play Store

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new multi-modal search method to detect and analyze significant transformations in mobile apps over time, revealing various metamorphosis scenarios and associated security risks.

Contribution

It presents a novel methodology for identifying app metamorphosis in Google Play Store data and characterizes different transformation types and their implications.

Findings

Re-branded apps perform about 11.3% better than average top apps.

The methodology uncovers diverse metamorphosis scenarios like re-births and re-purposing.

Security and privacy risks are associated with app transformations.

Abstract

App markets have evolved into highly competitive and dynamic environments for developers. While the traditional app life cycle involves incremental updates for feature enhancements and issue resolution, some apps deviate from this norm by undergoing significant transformations in their use cases or market positioning. We define this previously unstudied phenomenon as 'app metamorphosis'. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient multi-modal search methodology to identify apps undergoing metamorphosis and apply it to analyse two snapshots of the Google Play Store taken five years apart. Our methodology uncovers various metamorphosis scenarios, including re-births, re-branding, re-purposing, and others, enabling comprehensive characterisation. Although these transformations may register as successful for app developers based on our defined success score metric (e.g., re-branded apps performing approximately 11.3% better than an average top app), we shed light on the concealed security and privacy risks that lurk within, potentially impacting even tech-savvy end-users.