Characterizing Smartphone Usage Patterns from Millions of Android Users Huoran Li, Xuan Lu, Xuanzhe Liu z Tao Xie Kaigui Bian Peking University University of Illinois Peking University {lihuoran, luxuan, xzl}@pku.edu.cn Urbana-Champaign
[email protected] [email protected] Felix Xiaozhu Lin Qiaozhu Mei Feng Feng Purdue University University of Michigan Wandoujia Lab
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT 1. INTRODUCTION The prevalence of smart devices has promoted the popular- The release of iPhone in 2007 has opened a new era of ity of mobile applications (a.k.a. apps) in recent years. A mobile computing. Eight years later, smart devices such as number of interesting and important questions remain unan- iPhones and Android devices have played an indispensable swered, such as why a user likes/dislikes an app, how an app role in our daily lives. The increasing popularity of mobile becomes popular or eventually perishes, how a user selects devices and apps has induced an evolution of software in- apps to install and interacts with them, how frequently an dustry. The emergence of online marketplaces and platform app is used and how much traffic it generates, etc. This APIs has been a game changer to developers, market in- paper presents an empirical analysis of app usage behaviors termediaries, and consumers, making them more and more collected from millions of users of Wandoujia, a leading An- willing to develop, disseminate, and use mobile apps rather droid app marketplace in China. The dataset covers two than Web-based services [24]. types of user behaviors of using over 0.2 million Android The prevalence of mobile apps has also generated a huge apps, including (1) app management activities (i.e., installa- volume of app usage data.