# Detecting and Characterising Mobile App Metamorphosis in Google Play Store

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.14565 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14565/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [MPNet: Masked and Permuted Pre-training for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09297/) (2020)
- [StyTr2: Image Style Transfer with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14576/) (2021)
- [An Exploration of Encoder-Decoder Approaches to Multi-Label Classification for Legal and Biomedical Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05627/) (2023)
- [Why an Android App is Classified as Malware? Towards Malware Classification Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11516/) (2020)
- [Beyond Google Play: A Large-Scale Comparative Study of Chinese Android App Markets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.07780/) (2018)
- [A Multi-modal Neural Embeddings Approach for Detecting Mobile Counterfeit Apps: A Case Study on Google Play Store](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.02231/) (2020)
- [A Longitudinal Study of Google Play](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02996/) (2018)
- [Proactive Libraries: Enforcing Correct Behaviors in Android Apps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11999/) (2022)
- [Mixed Signals: Analyzing Software Attribution Challenges in the Android Ecosystem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13104/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Detecting Content Rating Violations in Android Applications: A Vision-Language Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15739/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

App markets have evolved into highly competitive and dynamic environments for developers. While the traditional app life cycle involves incremental updates for feature enhancements and issue resolution, some apps deviate from this norm by undergoing significant transformations in their use cases or market positioning. We define this previously unstudied phenomenon as 'app metamorphosis'. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient multi-modal search methodology to identify apps undergoing metamorphosis and apply it to analyse two snapshots of the Google Play Store taken five years apart. Our methodology uncovers various metamorphosis scenarios, including re-births, re-branding, re-purposing, and others, enabling comprehensive characterisation. Although these transformations may register as successful for app developers based on our defined success score metric (e.g., re-branded apps performing approximately 11.3% better than an average top app), we shed light on the concealed security and privacy risks that lurk within, potentially impacting even tech-savvy end-users.