Smartphone users are increasingly shifting to using apps as “gateways”
to Internet services rather than traditional web browsers.
App marketplaces for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone platforms
have made it attractive for developers to deploy apps and easy for
users to discover and start using many network-enabled apps quickly.
For example, it was recently reported that the iOS AppStore has
more than 350K apps and more than 10 billion downloads. Furthermore,
the appearance of tablets and mobile devices with other
form factors, which also use these marketplaces, has increased the
diversity in apps and their user population. Despite the increasing
importance of apps as gateways to network services, we have a
much sparser understanding of how, where, and when they are used
compared to traditional web services, particularly at scale. This paper
takes a first step in addressing this knowledge gap by presenting
results on app usage at a national level using anonymized network
measurements from a tier-1 cellular carrier in the U.S. We identify
traffic from distinct marketplace apps based on HTTP signatures
and present aggregate results on their spatial and temporal prevalence,
locality, and correlation