A comparative study between android phone and TV apps

Abstract

Smart TVs have surged in popularity, leading developers to create TV versions of mobile apps. Understanding the relationship between TV and mobile apps is key to building consistent, secure, and optimized cross-platform experiences while addressing TV-specific SDK challenges. Despite extensive research on mobile apps, TV apps have been given little attention, leaving the relationship between phone and TV apps unexplored. Our study addresses this gap by compiling an extensive collection of 3445 Android phone/TV app pairs from the Google Play Store, launching the first comparative analysis of its kind. We examined these pairs across multiple dimensions, including non-code elements, code structure, security, and privacy aspects. Our findings reveal that while these app pairs could get identified with the same package names, they deploy different artifacts with varying functionality across platforms. TV apps generally exhibit less complexity in terms of hardware-dependent features and code volume but maintain significant shared resource files and components with their phone versions. Interestingly, some categories of TV apps show similar or even severe security and privacy concerns compared to their mobile counterparts. This research aims to assist developers and researchers in understanding phone-TV app relationships, highlight domain-specific concerns necessitating TV-specific tools, and provide insights for migrating apps from mobile to TV platforms.