07-09-2014, 08:38 PM
In last few years Smartphones have gain popularity. Lots of people have started using Smartphones. These phones are loaded with wide variety of features and rich Smartphone applications. These Smartphone applications are available on different application marketplaces. Mobile users can simply browse through these marketplaces and install applications on their mobile devices. Besides official marketplaces like Apple and Google, a number of third-party alternative marketplaces have also been created to host thousands of apps. Each third party marketplace must offer quality apps for mobile users. In this, we have performed study on six popular Android-based third party marketplaces. From that study we found that people generally repackage the legitimate apps from the official Android Play Store and distribute those repackaged apps via third party marketplaces. To understand it, we have used an app similarity measurement system called DroidMOSS that applies a fuzzy hashing technique to localize and detect the changes from app-repackaging behaviour. 5% to 13% of apps in these marketplaces were repackaged. Thus there is a need of process which can better regulate the third party marketplaces.