Understanding Incentivized Mobile App Installs on Google Play Store

Abstract

"Incentivized" advertising platforms allow mobile app developers to acquire new users by directly paying users to install and engage with mobile apps (e.g., create an account, make in-app purchases). Incentivized installs are banned by the Apple App Store and discouraged by the Google Play Store because they can manipulate app store metrics (e.g., install counts, appearance in top charts). Yet, many organizations still offer incentivized install services for Android apps. In this paper, we present the first study to understand the ecosystem of incentivized mobile app install campaigns in Android and its broader ramifications through a series of measurements. We identify incentivized install campaigns that require users to install an app and perform in-app tasks targeting manipulation of a wide variety of user engagement metrics (e.g., daily active users, user session lengths) and revenue. Our results suggest that these artificially inflated metrics can be effective in improving app store metrics as well as helping mobile app developers to attract funding from venture capitalists. Our study also indicates lax enforcement of the Google Play Store's existing policies to prevent these behaviors. It further motivates the need for stricter policing of incentivized install campaigns. Our proposed measurements can also be leveraged by the Google Play Store to identify potential policy violations.

RacketStore: Measurements of ASO Deception in Google Play via Mobile and App Usage

“…We now investigate the hypothesis (inspired from [38]) that workers and regular users differ in the manner in which they interact with installed apps. Apps Installed and Reviewed.…”

“…Farooqi et al [38] studied the market of incentivized app install platforms (IIP) through a honey app that collects the device id, the list of installed apps and events such as opening the app and in-app interaction. We leverage Farooqi et al [38]'s finding of a lack of interest in the app among the workers that installed it for money.…”

“…Farooqi et al [38] studied the market of incentivized app install platforms (IIP) through a honey app that collects the device id, the list of installed apps and events such as opening the app and in-app interaction. We leverage Farooqi et al [38]'s finding of a lack of interest in the app among the workers that installed it for money. RacketStore extends Farooqi et al [38]'s work by collecting and analyzing additional key data that notably includes the list of user accounts registered on the participant device, the reviews posted from those accounts, and the foreground app at 5s intervals.…”

“…A key to achieve this is to build an accurate understanding of the behaviors and strategies employed by fraudulent app search optimization (ASO) workers. In previous work, Farooqi et al [38] have shown that incentivized app install platforms (IIP) are able to provide thousands of installs that successfully evade Google defenses. Rahman et al [67] have reported a variety of detectionavoidance techniques employed by organizations that specialize in retention installs and fake reviews.…”

“…In an effort to determine whether solutions can be developed to detect these ASO strategies, in this paper we seek to measure and compare the device and app usage of ASO workers and regular users. Our work is partially motivated by Farooqi et al [38]'s finding that ASO workers lack interest in the apps that they promote. We conjecture this also results in, e.g., workers posting reviews for promoted apps soon after installing them, see Figure 1.…”