geodiff-app

This repository contains the code associated with the paper A Large-scale Investigation into Geodifferences in Mobile Apps (USENIX 2022). More information about the project can be found at https://geodiff.app.

@inproceedings{kumar2022geodifferences,
  title={{A Large-scale Investigation into Geodifferences in Mobile Apps}},
  author={Renuka Kumar and Apurva Virkud and Ram Sundara Raman and Atul Prakash and Roya Ensafi},
  booktitle={USENIX Security Symposium},
  year={2022}
}

Data

The metadata and APK error datasets can be downloaded directly here. Please reach out to us for access to the privacy policy and APK datasets.

Code

• apk-downloader: download apps from Google Play
• gpcrawler: download app metadata from Google Play
• privacy: download privacy policies for Google Play apps

Contact

The team can be contacted at geodiff.app@umich.edu.

Setup

• This project uses Pipfiles to manage Python dependencies.
  • To install pipenv: instructions
  • For more information on Pipfile and Pipfile.lock usage: documentation
• Run pipenv install in the same directory as the Pipfile whose dependencies you want to install.
  • apk-downloader, gpcrawler, and privacy each contain a Pipfile and Pipfile.lock for their respective dependencies.
  • There are conflicts between the dependencies for the three subdirectories, so it is recommended to use separate environments.
• setup.cfg contains formatting rules for development.
  • To lint code, install pylint and run python -m pylint **/*.py **/**/*.py --rcfile=setup.cfg

Citation

Please use the following citation (provided in BibTex format) when using this dataset and/or code:

@inproceedings{kumar2022geodifferences,
  title={{A Large-scale Investigation into Geodifferences in Mobile Apps}},
  author={Renuka Kumar and Apurva Virkud and Ram Sundara Raman and Atul Prakash and Roya Ensafi},
  booktitle={USENIX Security Symposium},
  year={2022}
}

Licensing

• This repository is released under the GNU General Public License (see LICENSE).
• apk-downloader/PlaystoreDownloader was originally forked from PlaystoreDownloader v1.1.0, which was released under the MIT License (see apk-downloader/PlaystoreDownloader/LICENSE).
• gpcrawler/mpyscraper was originally forked from google-play-scraper v0.0.6, which was released under the MIT License (see gpcrawler/LICENSE).