Android apps consistency scrutinized

Abstract

The increasingly larger selection of mobile apps has made it difficult for users to understand what a particular app does and how it differs from the others. A user typically learns about an app from the app's public information (while deciding whether to install it), from the app's UI (while exploring the UI), and from the app's actual behaviors (while using it). Users may become confused or surprised if there are inconsistencies between (a) the public information and UI, (b) the UI and the actual behavior, or (c) the public information and the actual behavior. For example, turning on the camera (actual behavior) when there is no button that says SNAP (UI) is a potentially confusing inconsistency. We present work-in-progress toward a methodology for automatically detecting inconsistencies in Android apps with respect to permissions and similarity. We report our preliminary results on a large corpus of 178,765 apps.