Mobile communication is experiencing significant growth: the domain has been completely reshaped since the launch of the Apple iPhone (June 2007) and the ensuing development of so-called “smart phones.” Furthermore, together with the expansion of new mobile artifacts, mobile application markets (such as Apple iTunes Store and Android Google Play market) have contributed to the diffusion of new ...

Software ecosystem platforms such as Google’s Play Store or Apple’s App Store rely heavily on highly motivated third-party developers who are eager to invest their time and effort into developing and updating apps for platforms. Platform owners are challenged to find a balance between developers’ need for autonomy and a platform’s integrity. Despite the widely acknowledged importance of informa...

International Journal Web Applications Volume 7 Number 2 June 2015 ABSTRACT: This paper proposes a mobile app architecture that reuses the resources of the existing student information system of educational institutions. The educational institutions have an existing website that interacts with a data store to disseminate information to its stakeholders. The data store and the web resources have...

When we last “blocked” The BMJwebsite with a reader survey in 2012 more than 50 of you asked why our app offering was confined to iOS. Since then we have received many requests for The BMJ to be available as an Android app on the Google Play store. This email from one doctor was typical: “I do not use Apple products out of choice and feel that this is an area that urgently needs updating to inc...

Mobile apps have to satisfy various privacy requirements. App publishers are often obligated to provide a privacy policy and notify users of their apps’ privacy practices. But how can we tell whether an app behaves as its policy promises? In this study we introduce a scalable system to help analyze and predict Android apps’ compliance with privacy requirements. Our system is not only intended f...

With billions of people using smartphones and the exponential growth of smartphone apps, it is prohibitive for app marketplaces, such as Google App Store, to thoroughly verify if an app is legitimate or malicious. As a result, mobile users are left to decide for themselves whether an app is safe to use. Even worse, recent studies have shown that over 70% of apps in markets request to collect da...

Apple’s iOS is one of the major players in the smartphone market and it restricts installation of apps which are not from Apple app store. Users often resort to jailbreak their iPhones to break free from these restrictions. Considering jailbreaking iPhones is legal in the US; more devices are expected to be jailbroken in future. Jailbroken iPhones are making their way into enterprises, which al...

Mobile application markets facilitate the distribution of applications and thus help developers advertise their work and customers find useful applications. In addition, the operators of mobile application markets can control the quality and the content of the applications. These markets are growing rapidly with more than 300’000 application in the App Store of Apple and more than 100’000 in th...

In this paper, we examine the emerging copycat issue in the mobile apps market. Using machine learning techniques on large-scale unstructured data, we detect two types of copycats (deceptive and non-deceptive) from 10,100 action game apps from iOS App Store over five years. Based on our detected copycats, we model the key drivers of mobile app copycats as well as their major impacts. Our result...