Identifying diverse usage behaviors of smartphone apps

  • Authors:

  • Qiang Xu;Jeffrey Erman;Alexandre Gerber;Zhuoqing Mao;Jeffrey Pang;Shobha Venkataraman

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA;AT&T Labs Research, Florham Park, NJ, USA;AT&T Labs Research, Florham Park, NJ, USA;University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA;AT&T Labs Research, Florham Park, NJ, USA;AT&T Labs Research, Florham Park, NJ, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement conference
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

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.