Appcestry — A Tool for the Study of Mobile Application Similarities

Jason CHAO

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Dec 9, 2018 · 1 min read

This dissertation is submitted in part fulfilment of the requirements of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies of the University of Warwick for the degree of Master of Science in Big Data and Digital Futures.

Abstract

“Appcestry” — a portmanteau of “app” and “ancestry” — is a tool presented in this dissertation project for the study of similarities of software applications (apps) targeting the Android operating system. The tool extracts features from Android Application PacKages (APK) and transforms them into a format which this project names “AppGenes”. AppGenes may be used by Appcestry and other machine learning tools to discover similar Android applications.

Keywords: mobile, android, application (app), similarity, machine learning, digital method

Full text: DOI 10.13140/RG.2.2.12499.02081

Source code: GitHub repo

Demo: http://appcestry.jasontc.net/

Presentation: slides