A longitudinal study of the Google app market

Abstract

Recently emerged app markets provide a centralized paradigm for software distribution in smartphones. The difficulty of massively collecting app data has led to a lack a good understanding of app market dynamics. In this paper we seek to address this problem, through a detailed temporal analysis of Google Play, Google's app market. We perform the analysis on data that we collected daily from 160,000 apps, over a period of six months in 2012. We report often surprising results. For instance, at most 50% of the apps are updated in all categories, which significantly impacts the median price. The average price does not exhibit seasonal monthly trends and a changing price does not show any observable correlation with the download count. In addition, productive developers are not creating many popular apps, but a few developers control apps which dominate the total number of downloads. We discuss the research implications of such analytics on improving developer and user experiences, and detecting emerging threat vectors.