A measurement study of google play

Although millions of users download and use third-party Android applications from the Google Play store, little in-formation is known on an aggregated level about these ap-plications. We have built PlayDrone, the first scalable Google Play store crawler, and used it to index and analyze over 1,100,000 applications in the Google Play store on a daily basis, the largest such index of Android applications. PlayDrone leverages various hacking techniques to circum-vent Google’s roadblocks for indexing Google Play store con-tent, and makes proprietary application sources available, including source code for over 880,000 free applications. We demonstrate the usefulness of PlayDrone in decompiling and analyzing application content by exploring four pre-viously unaddressed issues: the characterization of Google Play application content at large scale and its evolution over time, library usage in applications and its impact on appli-cation portability, duplicative application content in Google Play, and the ineffectiveness of OAuth and related service authentication mechanisms resulting in malicious users be-ing able to easily gain unauthorized access to user data and resources on Amazon Web Services and Facebook.