We have used PlayDrone to crawl the Google Play store
and analyze over 1,100,000 Android applications, including
decompiling the source code for over 880,000 free Android
applications and analyzing over 100 billion lines of decompiled
code. We demonstrate the usefulness of PlayDrone
for analyzing application content by exploring four previously
unaddressed issues in understanding Android applications.
First, we provide a characterization of Google Play
application content at scale. We discuss the relationship between
application ratings and download frequency, discuss
how applications are categorized in Google Play and how the
choice of self-categorization can affect application visibility.
We show how Google Play store content evolves over time,
providing a measure of how often applications are released,
updated, and removed. We also show that a small percentage
of free applications account for almost all downloads