Comparing Android Applications to Find Copying

The Android smartphone operating system includes a Java virtual machine that enables rapid development and deployment of a wide variety of applications. The open nature of the platform means that reverse engineering of applications is relatively easy, and many developers are concerned as applications similar to their own show up in the Android marketplace and want to know if these applications are pirated. Fortunately, the same characteristics that make an Android application easy to reverse engineer and copy also provide opportunities for Android developers to compare downloaded applications to their own. This paper describes the process for comparing a developer’s application with a downloaded application and defines an identifiability metric to quantify the degree to which an application can be identified by its bytecode. General Terms: Android, Bytecode, Decompiled Code, Identifiability Metric, Java, Software Copying, Software Forensics, Software Plagiarism, Source Code.