Comparing Apples to Androids: Discovery, Retrieval, and Matching of iOS and Android Apps for Cross-Platform Analyses
Authors: 
Magdalena Steinböck, Jakob Bleier, 
Mikka Rainer, Tobias Urban, Christine Utz, Martina LindorferAuthors Info & Claims
Magdalena Steinböck, Jakob Bleier, Mikka Rainer, Tobias Urban, Christine Utz, Martina LindorferAuthors Info & ClaimsPages 348 - 360
Abstract
For years, researchers have been analyzing mobile Android apps to investigate diverse properties such as software engineering practices, business models, security, privacy, or usability, as well as differences between marketplaces. While similar studies on iOS have been limited, recent work has started to analyze and compare Android apps with those for iOS. To obtain the most representative analysis results across platforms, the ideal approach is to compare their characteristics and behavior for the same set of apps, e. g., to study a set of apps for iOS and their respective counterparts for Android. Previous work has only attempted to identify and evaluate such cross-platform apps to a limited degree, mostly comparing sets of apps independently drawn from app stores, manually matching small sets of apps, or relying on brittle matches based on app and developer names. This results in (1) comparing apps whose behavior and properties significantly differ, (2) limited scalability, and (3) the risk of matching only a small fraction of apps.
In this work, we propose a novel approach to create an extensive dataset of cross-platform apps for the iOS and Android ecosystems. We describe an analysis pipeline for discovering, retrieving, and matching apps from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store that we used to create a set of 3,322 cross-platform apps out of 10,000 popular apps for iOS and Android, respectively. We evaluate existing and new approaches for cross-platform app matching against a set of reference pairs that we obtained from Google's data migration service. We identify a combination of seven features from app store metadata and the apps themselves to match iOS and Android apps with high confidence (95.82 %). Compared to previous attempts that identified 14 % of apps as cross-platform, we are able to match 34 % of apps in our dataset. To foster future research in the cross-platform analysis of mobile apps, we make our pipeline available to the community.
References
[1]
Y. Agarwal and M. Hall. "ProtectMyPrivacy: Detecting and Mitigating Privacy Leaks on iOS Devices Using Crowdsourcing". In: Proc. of the Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys). 2013.
[2]
M. Alfhaily. IPATool. 2023. url: https://github.com/majd/ipatool.
[3]
M. Ali, M. E. Joorabchi, and A. Mesbah. "Same App, Different App Stores: A Comparative Study". In: Proc. of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems (MOBILESoft). 2017.
[4]
M. Ali and A. Mesbah. "Mining and Characterizing Hybrid Apps". In: Proc. of the International Workshop on App Market Analytics (WAMA). 2016.
[5]
K. Allix, T. F. Bissyandé, J. Klein, and Y. Le Traon. "AndroZoo: Collecting Millions of Android Apps for the Research Community". In: Proc. of the International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR). Available at: https://androzoo.uni.lu. 2016.
[6]
B. Andow, S. Y. Mahmud, W. Wang, J. Whitaker, W. Enck, B. Reaves, K. Singh, and T. Xie. "PolicyLint: Investigating Internal Privacy Policy Contradictions on Google Play". In: Proc. of the USENIX Security Symposium. 2019.
[7]
Apple Inc. App Store Downloads on iTunes. 2023. url: https://apps.apple.com/us/genre/ios/id36.
[8]
Apple Inc. Update on apps distributed in the European Union: Alternative distribution on iOS in the EU. 2024. url: https://developer.apple.com/support/dma-and-apps-in-the-eu/#ios-app-eu.
[9]
Aurora OSS. GPlayAPI. 2023. url: https://gitlab.com/AuroraOSS/gplayapi.
[10]
B. Bonné, S. T. Peddinti, I. Bilogrevic, and N. Taft. "Exploring Decision Making with Android's Runtime Permission Dialogs using In-context Surveys". In: Proc. of the USENIX Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS). 2017.
[11]
J. Buchner. ImageHash. 2023. url: https://github.com/JohannesBuchner/imagehash.
[12]
P. Calciati, K. Kuznetsov, X. Bai, and A. Gorla. "What did Really Change with the new Release of the App?" In: Proc. of the International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR). 2018.
[13]
K. Chen, X. Wang, Y. Chen, P. Wang, Y. Lee, X. Wang, B. Ma, A. Wang, Y. Zhang, and W. Zou. "Following Devil's Footprints: Cross-Platform Analysis of Potentially Harmful Libraries on Android and iOS". In: Proc. of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P). 2016.
[14]
L. Chen, C. Shi, Y. Ma, and Z. Shao. "Research on iOS Application of Internal Privacy Leakage Detection Technology". In: Proc. of the International Conference on Intelligent Computation Technology and Automation (ICICTA). 2018.
[15]
Q. Chen, C. Chen, S. Hassan, Z. Xing, X. Xia, and A. E. Hassan. "How Should I Improve the UI of My App? A Study of User Reviews of Popular Apps in the Google Play". In: ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology 30.3 (2021).
[16]
D. Domínguez-Álvarez and A. Gorla. "Release Practices for iOS and Android Apps". In: Proc. of the International Workshop on App Market Analytics (WAMA). 2019.
[17]
M. Egele, C. Kruegel, E. Kirda, and G. Vigna. "PiOS: Detecting Privacy Leaks in iOS Applications". In: Proc. of the Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS). 2011.
[18]
S. Farooqi, Á. Feal, T. Lauinger, D. McCoy, Z. Shafiq, and N. Vallina-Rodriguez. "Understanding Incentivized Mobile App Installs on Google Play Store". In: Proc. of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC). 2020.
[19]
B. Fu, J. Lin, L. Li, C. Faloutsos, J. Hong, and N. Sadeh. "Why People Hate Your App: Making Sense of User Feedback in a Mobile App Store". In: Proc. of the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD). 2013.
[20]
A. Geitgey. Everything you need to know about implementing iOS and Android Mobile Deep Linking. 2016. url: https://medium.com/@ageitgey/everything-you-need-to-know-about-implementing-ios-and-android-mobile-deep-linking-f4348b265b49.
[21]
Google LLC. Data Restore Tool. 2023. url: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.restore.
[22]
M. Gruber, C. Höfig, M. Golla, T. Urban, and M. Große-Kampmann. "'We may share the number of diaper changes': A Privacy and Security Analysis of Mobile Child Care Applications". In: Proc. on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETS) 2022.3 (2022).
[23]
K. Hageman, Á. Feal, J. Gamba, A. Girish, J. Bleier, M. Lindorfer, J. Tapiador, and N. Vallina-Rodriguez. "Mixed Signals: Analyzing Software Attribution Challenges in the Android Ecosystem". In: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 49.4 (2023).
[24]
C. Han, I. Reyes, A. Elazari Bar On, J. Reardon, Á. Feal, K. A. Bamberger, S. Egelman, and N. Vallina-Rodriguez. "Do You Get What You Pay For? Comparing the Privacy Behaviors of Free vs. Paid Apps". In: Proc. of the Workshop on Technology and Consumer Protection (ConPro). 2019.
[25]
J. Han, Q. Yan, D. Gao, J. Zhou, and R. Deng. "Comparing Mobile Privacy Protection through Cross-Platform Applications". In: Proc. of the Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS). 2013.
[26]
H. Hosseini, M. Degeling, C. Utz, and T. Hupperich. "Unifying Privacy Policy Detection". In: Proc. on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETS) 2021.4 (2021).
[27]
H. Hu, Y. Tian, S. Hassan, and D. Lin. "Analyzing Gamer Complaints in Reviews of Cross-Platform Video Games on Steam". In: Proc. of the IEEE Conference on Games (CoG). 2023.
[28]
H. Hu, C.-P. Bezemer, and A. E. Hassan. "Studying the Consistency of Star Ratings and the Complaints in 1 & 2-Star User Reviews for Top Free Cross-Platform Android and iOS Apps". In: Empirical Software Engineering 23 (2018).
[29]
H. Hu, S. Wang, C.-P. Bezemer, and A. E. Hassan. "Studying the Consistency of Star Ratings and Reviews of Popular Free Hybrid Android and iOS Apps". In: Empirical Software Engineering 24 (2019).
[30]
Huawei Internet Services. Phone Clone. 2023. url: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hicloud.android.clone.
[31]
S. Koch, B. Altpeter, and M. Johns. "The OK Is Not Enough: A Large Scale Study of Consent Dialogs in Smartphone Applications". In: Proc. of the USENIX Security Symposium. 2023.
[32]
K. Kollnig, A. Shuba, R. Binns, M. Van Kleek, and N. Shadbolt. "Are iPhones Really Better for Privacy? A Comparative Study of iOS and Android Apps". In: Proc. on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETS) 2022.2 (2022).
[33]
M. Lindorfer, S. Volanis, A. Sisto, M. Neugschwandtner, E. Athanasopoulos, F. Maggi, C. Platzer, S. Zanero, and S. Ioannidis. "AndRadar: Fast Discovery of Android Applications in Alternative Markets". In: Proc. of the International Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment (DIMVA). 2014.
[34]
W. Liu, G. Zhang, J. Chen, Y. Zou, and W. Ding. "A Measurement-based Study on Application Popularity in Android and iOS App Stores". In: Proc. of the Workshop on Mobile Big Data (Mobidata). 2015.
[35]
Mitmproxy Project. mitmproxy - an interactive HTTPS proxy. 2022. url: https://mitmproxy.org/.
[36]
P. Nema, P. Anthonysamy, N. Taft, and S. T. Peddinti. "Analyzing User Perspectives on Mobile App Privacy at Scale". In: Proc. of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). 2022.
[37]
T. T. Nguyen, M. Backes, N. Marnau, and B. Stock. "Share First, Ask Later (or Never?) Studying Violations of GDPR's Explicit Consent in Android Apps". In: Proc. of the USENIX Security Symposium. 2021.
[38]
T. T. Nguyen, M. Backes, and B. Stock. "Freely Given Consent? Studying Consent Notice of Third-Party Tracking and Its Violations of GDPR in Android Apps". In: Proc. of the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS). 2022.
[39]
NLTK Project. Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK). 2023. url: https://github.com/nltk/nltk.
[40]
M. Oltrogge, E. Derr, C. Stransky, Y. Acar, S. Fahl, C. Rossow, G. Pellegrino, S. Bugiel, and M. Backes. "The Rise of the Citizen Developer: Assessing the Security Impact of Online App Generators". In: Proc. of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P). 2018.
[41]
D. Orikogbo, M. Büchler, and M. Egele. "CRiOS: Toward Large-Scale iOS Application Analysis". In: Proc. of the Workshop on Security and Privacy in Smartphones and Mobile Devices (SPSM). 2016.
[42]
F. Paci, J. Pizzoli, and N. Zannone. "A Comprehensive Study on Third-Party User Tracking in Mobile Applications". In: Proc. of the International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES). 2023.
[43]
E. Pan, J. Ren, M. Lindorfer, C. Wilson, and D. Choffnes. "Panoptispy: Characterizing Audio and Video Exfiltration from Android Applications". In: Proc. on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETS) 2018.4 (2018).
[44]
F. Pedregosa, G. Varoquaux, A. Gramfort, V. Michel, B. Thirion, O. Grisel, M. Blondel, P. Prettenhofer, R. Weiss, V. Dubourg, J. Vanderplas, A. Passos, D. Cournapeau, M. Brucher, M. Perrot, and É. Duchesnay. "Scikit-learn: Machine Learning in Python". In: Journal of Machine Learning Research 12 (2011). Available at: https://scikit-learn.org.
[45]
T. Petsas, A. Papadogiannakis, M. Polychronakis, E. P. Markatos, and T. Karagiannis. "Rise of the Planet of the Apps: A Systematic Study of the Mobile App Ecosystem". In: Proc. of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC). 2013.
[46]
M. Pfefferle. Apple App Store Crawler. 2021. url: https://gitlab.com/marzzzello/appstore_crawler.
[47]
M. Pfefferle. gplaycrawler. 2021. url: https://gitlab.com/marzzzello/gplaycrawler.
[48]
A. Pradeep, M. T. Paracha, P. Bhowmick, A. Davanian, A. Razaghpanah, T. Chung, M. Lindorfer, N. Vallina-Rodriguez, D. Levin, and D. Choffnes. "A Comparative Analysis of Certificate Pinning in Android & iOS". In: Proc. of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC). 2022.
[49]
M. Rahman, N. Hernandez, R. Recabarren, S. I. Ahmed, and B. Carbunar. "The Art and Craft of Fraudulent App Promotion in Google Play". In: Proc. of the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS). 2019.
[50]
J. Rajasegaran, N. Karunanayake, A. Gunathillake, S. Seneviratne, and G. Jourjon. "A Multi-Modal Neural Embeddings Approach for Detecting Mobile Counterfeit Apps". In: Proc. of the World Wide Web Conference (WWW). 2019.
[51]
J. Ren, M. Lindorfer, D. J. Dubois, A. Rao, D. Choffnes, and N. Vallina-Rodriguez. "Bug Fixes, Improvements, ... and Privacy Leaks - A Longitudinal Study of PII Leaks Across Android App Versions". In: Proc. of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS). 2018.
[52]
J. Ren, A. Rao, M. Lindorfer, A. Legout, and D. Choffnes. "ReCon: Revealing and Controlling PII Leaks in Mobile Network Traffic". In: Proc. of the Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys). 2016.
[53]
D. Rodriguez, A. Jain, J. M. D. Alamo, and N. Sadeh. "Comparing Privacy Label Disclosures of Apps Published in both the App Store and Google Play Stores". In: Proc. of the International Workshop on Privacy Engineering (IWPE). 2023.
[54]
P. Salza, F. Palomba, D. Di Nucci, C. D'Uva, A. De Lucia, and F. Ferrucci. "Do Developers Update Third-Party Libraries in Mobile Apps?" In: Proc. of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC). 2018.
[55]
P. Salza, F. Palomba, D. Di Nucci, A. De Lucia, and F. Ferrucci. "Third-Party Libraries in Mobile Apps: When, How, and Why Developers Update Them". In: Empirical Software Engineering 25.3 (2020).
[56]
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. Samsung Smart Switch Mobile. 2023. url: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sec.android.easyMover.
[57]
S. Sebastian and J. Caballero. "Towards Attribution in Mobile Markets: Identifying Developer Account Polymorphism". In: Proc. of the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS). 2020.
[58]
S. Seneviratne, H. Kolamunna, and A. Seneviratne. "A Measurement Study of Tracking in Paid Mobile Applications". In: Proc. of the ACM Conference on Security & Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (WiSec). 2015.
[59]
W. Squires and P. Centonze. "Cross-Platform Access-Rights Analysis of Mobile Applications". In: Proc. of the International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems (MOBILESoft). 2016.
[60]
StatCounter. Mobile Operating System Market Share Worldwide, Oct 2022 -- Oct 2023. 2023. url: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide.
[61]
M. Steinböck. Android vs. iOS: Security of Mobile Deep Links. Master Thesis, TU Wien, 2022.
[62]
C. Tang, S. Chen, L. Fan, L. Xu, Y. Liu, Z. Tang, and L. Dou. "A Large-Scale Empirical Study on Industrial Fake Apps". In: Proc. of the International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice (ICSE-SEIP). 2019.
[63]
University of Luxembourg. Androzoo: Google Play Metadata. 2023. url: https://androzoo.uni.lu/gp-metadata.
[64]
N. Viennot, E. Garcia, and J. Nieh. "A Measurement Study of Google Play". In: Proc. of the ACM International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems (SIGMETRICS). 2014.
[65]
H. Wang, H. Li, and Y. Guo. "Understanding the Evolution of Mobile App Ecosystems: A Longitudinal Measurement Study of Google Play". In: Proc. of the World Wide Web Conference (WWW). 2019.
[66]
H. Wang, Z. Liu, Y. Guo, X. Chen, M. Zhang, G. Xu, and J. Hong. "An Explorative Study of the Mobile App Ecosystem from App Developers' Perspective". In: Proc. of the International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW). 2017.
[67]
H. Wang, Z. Liu, J. Liang, N. Vallina-Rodriguez, Y. Guo, L. Li, J. Tapiador, J. Cao, and G. Xu. "Beyond Google Play: A Large-scale Comparative Study of Chinese Android App Markets". In: Proc. of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC). 2018.
[68]
J. Wu. Magisk. 2023. url: https://github.com/topjohnwu/Magisk.
[69]
Z. Xie, S. Zhu, Q. Li, and W. Wang. "You Can Promote, but You Can't Hide: Large-Scale Abused App Detection in Mobile App Stores". In: Proc. of the Annual Conference on Computer Security Applications (ACSAC). 2016.
[70]
N. Zhong and F. Michahelles. "Google Play Is Not A Long Tail Market: An Empirical Analysis of App Adoption on the Google Play App Market". In: Proc. of the Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC). 2013.
[71]
S. Zimmeck, Z. Wang, L. Zou, R. Iyengar, B. Liu, F. Schaub, S. Wilson, N. Sadeh, S. M. Bellovin, and J. Reidenberg. "Automated Analysis of Privacy Requirements for Mobile Apps". In: Proc. of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS). 2017.
Index Terms
- Comparing Apples to Androids: Discovery, Retrieval, and Matching of iOS and Android Apps for Cross-Platform Analyses
Recommendations
Code smells in iOS apps: how do they compare to Android?
MOBILESoft '17: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and SystemsWith billions of app downloads, the Apple App Store and Google Play Store succeeded to conquer mobile devices. However, this success also challenges app developers to publish high-quality apps to keep attracting and satisfying end-users. In particular, ...
Studying the consistency of star ratings and the complaints in 1 & 2-star user reviews for top free cross-platform Android and iOS apps
How users rate a mobile app via star ratings and user reviews is of utmost importance for the success of an app. Recent studies and surveys show that users rely heavily on star ratings and user reviews that are provided by other users, for deciding ...
Cross-Compiling Android Applications to iOS and Windows Phone 7
Android is currently leading the smartphone segment in terms of market share since its introduction in 2007. Android applications are written in Java using an API designed for mobile apps. Other smartphone platforms, such as Apple's iOS or Microsoft's ...
Comments
Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
April 2024
788 pages
ISBN:9798400705878
DOI:10.1145/3643991
- Chair:
- Diomidis Spinellis,
- Program Chair:
- Alberto Bacchelli,
- Program Co-chair:
- Eleni Constantinou
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.
Sponsors
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 02 July 2024
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Research-article
Funding Sources
- Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF)
- Austrian Science Fund (FWF)
- German Federal Ministry of Education and Research
Conference
MSR '24
Sponsor:
MSR '24: 21st International Conference on Mining Software Repositories
April 15 - 16, 2024
Lisbon, Portugal
Upcoming Conference
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 175Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)175
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)37
Reflects downloads up to 27 Jan 2025
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign in