Investigating Mobile Applications Quality in Official and Third-party Marketplaces

Abstract

One of the winning factors of Android was the use of the Java programming language and the XML language for application development. Furthermore, the open-source license and the availability of reverse engineering tools stimulated the proliferation of third-party markets where users can download for free repackaged version of commercial app, facilitating the phenomenon of plagiarism. In this paper we present an empirical study aimed to define whether there are differences from the quality point of view in Android applications available in the official market and in third-party ones, investigating whether supervised and unsupervised models built with a set of features belonging to four categories (i.e., dimensional, complexity, object oriented and Android) are effective in app store detection.