-
Demystifying Removed Apps in iOS App Store
With the popularity of mobile devices, mobile applications have become a...
read it
-
Mapping System Level Behaviors with Android APIs via System Call Dependence Graphs
Due to Android's open source feature and low barriers to entry for devel...
read it
-
An Empirical Study of In-App Advertising Issues Based on Large Scale App Review Analysis
In-app advertising closely relates to app revenue. Reckless ad integrati...
read it
-
A Framework for App Store Optimization
In this paper a framework for app store optimization is proposed. The fr...
read it
-
Learning Continuous User Representations through Hybrid Filtering with doc2vec
Players in the online ad ecosystem are struggling to acquire the user da...
read it
-
Social Learning and Diffusion of Pervasive Goods: An Empirical Study of an African App Store
In this study, the authors develop a structural model that combines a ma...
read it
-
Generating Requirements Out of Thin Air: Towards Automated Feature Identification for New Apps
App store mining has proven to be a promising technique for requirements...
read it
Understanding Incentivized Mobile App Installs on Google Play Store
"Incentivized" advertising platforms allow mobile app developers to acquire new users by directly paying users to install and engage with mobile apps (e.g., create an account, make in-app purchases). Incentivized installs are banned by the Apple App Store and discouraged by the Google Play Store because they can manipulate app store metrics (e.g., install counts, appearance in top charts). Yet, many organizations still offer incentivized install services for Android apps. In this paper, we present the first study to understand the ecosystem of incentivized mobile app install campaigns in Android and its broader ramifications through a series of measurements. We identify incentivized install campaigns that require users to install an app and perform in-app tasks targeting manipulation of a wide variety of user engagement metrics (e.g., daily active users, user session lengths) and revenue. Our results suggest that these artificially inflated metrics can be effective in improving app store metrics as well as helping mobile app developers to attract funding from venture capitalists. Our study also indicates lax enforcement of the Google Play Store's existing policies to prevent these behaviors. It further motivates the need for stricter policing of incentivized install campaigns. Our proposed measurements can also be leveraged by the Google Play Store to identify potential policy violations.
READ FULL TEXT
Comments
There are no comments yet.