skip to main content
10.1145/3314183.3324965acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesumapConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Shedding Light on Mobile App Store Censorship

Published: 06 June 2019 Publication History

Abstract

This paper studies the availability of apps and app stores across countries. Our research finds that users in specific countries do not have access to popular app stores due to local laws, financial reasons, or because countries are on a sanctions list that prohibit foreign businesses to operate within its jurisdiction. Furthermore, this paper presents a novel methodology for querying the public search engines and APIs of major app stores (Google Play Store, Apple App Store, Tencent MyApp Store) that is cross-verified by network measurements. This allows us to investigate which apps are available in which country. We primarily focused on the availability of VPN apps in Russia and China. Our results show that despite both countries having restrictive VPN laws, there are still many VPN apps available in Russia and only a handful in China. In addition, we have included findings of a global search for the availability of privacy-enhancing and other apps that are known to be censored. Finally, we observe that it is difficult to find out which apps have been removed or are unavailable on the examined app stores. As a consequence, we urge all app store providers to introduce app store transparency reports, which would include when apps were removed and for what reasons.

References

[1]
2017. Apple drops hundreds of VPN apps at Beijing's request. https://www. ft.com/content/ad42e536-cf36--11e7-b781--794ce08b24dc {Online; accessed 16. Apr. 2019}.
[2]
2017. Apple removes VPN Apps from China App Store j ExpressVPN. https: //www.expressvpn.com/blog/china-ios-app-store-removes-vpns {Online; accessed 16. Apr. 2019}.
[3]
2017. Top App Stores & mobile apps in China for Q1 2017. https://www. chinainternetwatch.com/20410/top-app-stores-mobile-apps-q1--2017 {Online; accessed 16. Apr. 2019}.
[4]
2018. China's Cybersecurity Law: An Intro for Foreign Businesses. https://www.china-briefing.com/news/ chinas-cybersecurity-law-an-introduction-for-foreign-businesspeople {Online; accessed 16. Apr. 2019}.
[5]
2018. European Commission - PRESS RELEASES - Press release - Antitrust: Commission fines Google ?4.34 billion for illegal practices regarding Android mobile devices to strengthen dominance of Google's search engine. http: //europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18--4581_en.htm {Online; accessed 16. Apr. 2019}.
[6]
2018. In re Apple iPhone Antitrust Litig., 846 F.3d 313 (9th Cir. 2017) (No. 17- 204).
[7]
2018. Russia Will Penalize For Using and Promoting VPN Services, So Now What? j VPNBase. https://vpnbase.com/blog/ russia-will-penalize-for-using-and-promoting-vpn-services {Online; accessed 16. Apr. 2019}.
[8]
2019. App Store, iTunes Store, and Apple Books availability. https://support. apple.com/en-us/HT204411 {Online; accessed 16. Apr. 2019}.
[9]
2019. AppInChina Chinese App Store Rankings - AppInChina j The Market. https://www.appinchina.co/market/app-stores {Online; accessed 16. Apr. 2019}.
[10]
2019. China will block all non-approved VPNs from next month. https://www.techradar.com/news/ china-will-block-all-non-approved-vpns-from-next-month {Online; accessed 16. Apr. 2019}.
[11]
2019. hack66/appavail. https://github.com/hack66/appavail {Online; accessed 16. Apr. 2019}.
[12]
2019. iTunes Search API - Affiliate Resources. https://affiliate.itunes. apple.com/resources/documentation/itunes-store-web-service-search-api/ #searchexamples {Online; accessed 16. Apr. 2019}.
[13]
2019. LinkedIn - AppAddict. https://www.appaddict.org/view.php?trackid= 288429040 {Online; accessed 16. Apr. 2019}.
[14]
2019. LinkedIn 4.1.249 Download APK for Android - Aptoide. https:// linkedin-android.en.aptoide.com {Online; accessed 16. Apr. 2019}.
[15]
2019. Not Found. http://web.archive.org/web/20190313183244/https:// play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.linkedin.android&gl=ru {Online; accessed 16. Apr. 2019}.
[16]
2019. Russia to Fine Search Engines for Linking to Banned VPN services. https: //thehackernews.com/2018/06/russian-vpn-services.html {Online; accessed 16. Apr. 2019}.
[17]
2019. Russian telecom watchdog blocks 50 VPN services and anonymizers for Telegram access. http://tass.com/economy/1002762 {Online; accessed 16. Apr. 2019}.
[18]
2019. Supported locations for distribution to Google Play users - Play Console Help. https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/table/3541286 {Online; accessed 16. Apr. 2019}.
[19]
2019. Tencent xn--r70as2s - Terms of Service. https://www.tencent.com/en-us/ zc/termsofservice.shtml {Online; accessed 16. Apr. 2019}.
[20]
2019. Welcome to Steam. https://store.steampowered.com {Online; accessed 16. Apr. 2019}.
[21]
2019. What is Russia's new VPN law all about? https://www.bbc.com/news/ technology-41829726 {Online; accessed 16. Apr. 2019}.
[22]
2019. xn--kbtj09tu77awtl. https://android.myapp.com {Online; accessed 16. Apr. 2019}.
[23]
2019. ??????????? ????? ?? 29.07.2017 ? 276-?? "? ???????? ????????? ? ??????????? ????? "?? ??????????, ?????????????? ??????????? ? ? ?????? ??????????". http://publication.pravo.gov.ru/Document/View/ 0001201707300002?index=14&rangeSize=1 {Online; accessed 16. Apr. 2019}.
[24]
2019. ????????????. http://web.archive.org/web/ 20190331080839/http://www.npc.gov.cn/npc/xinwen/2016--11/07/content_ 2001605.htm {Online; accessed 16. Apr. 2019}.
[25]
2019. ???????????????????????????. http://www.miit.gov.cn/n1146290/n4388791/c5471946/content.html {Online; accessed 16. Apr. 2019}.
[26]
Urs-Vito Albrecht, Uta Hillebrand, and Ute von Jan. 2018. Relevance of trust marks and CE labels in German-language store descriptions of health apps: analysis. JMIR mHealth and uHealth 6, 4 (2018).
[27]
Ashley Carman. 2018. Apple will start reporting government requests to remove apps from the App Store. Verge (May 2018). https://www.theverge.com/2018/ 5/25/17396512/apple-transparency-report-app-takedown-requests
[28]
Ning Chen, Jialiu Lin, Steven C. H. Hoi, Xiaokui Xiao, and Boshen Zhang. 2014. AR-miner: Mining Informative Reviews for Developers from Mobile App Marketplace. In Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2014). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 767--778.
[29]
Arturo Filastò and Jacob Appelbaum. 2012. OONI: Open Observatory of Network Interference. In Free and Open Communications on the Internet. USENIX. https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/foci12/foci12-final12.pdf
[30]
Bin Fu, Jialiu Lin, Lei Li, Christos Faloutsos, Jason Hong, and Norman Sadeh. 2013. Why people hate your app: Making sense of user feedback in a mobile app store. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining. ACM, 1276--1284.
[31]
Ahmad Ghazawneh and Ola Henfridsson. 2015. A paradigmatic analysis of digital application marketplaces. Journal of Information Technology 30, 3 (2015), 198--208.
[32]
Luis Hestres. 2013. App neutrality: Apple's app store and freedom of expression online. (2013).
[33]
Nguyen Phong Hoang, Panagiotis Kintis, Manos Antonakakis, and Michalis Polychronakis. 2018. An Empirical Study of the I2P Anonymity Network and Its Censorship Resistance. In Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference 2018 (IMC '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 379--392.
[34]
Sean Hollister. 2018. Russia bans Telegram encrypted messaging app. CNET (Apr 2018). https://www.cnet.com/news/ russia-bans-telegram-encrypted-messaging-app
[35]
Slinger Jansen and Ewoud Bloemendal. 2013. Defining App Stores: The Role of Curated Marketplaces in Software Ecosystems. In Software Business. From Physical Products to Software Services and Solutions, Georg Herzwurm and Tiziana Margaria (Eds.). Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg, 195--206.
[36]
Soo Ling Lim, Peter J Bentley, Natalie Kanakam, Fuyuki Ishikawa, and Shinichi Honiden. 2015. Investigating country differences in mobile app user behavior and challenges for software engineering. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 41, 1 (2015), 40--64.
[37]
Daithí Mac Síthigh. 2013. App law within: rights and regulation in the smartphone age. International Journal of Law and Information Technology 21, 2 (2013), 154--186.
[38]
William Martin, Federica Sarro, Yue Jia, Yuanyuan Zhang, and Mark Harman. 2017. A survey of app store analysis for software engineering. IEEE transactions on software engineering 43, 9 (2017), 817--847.
[39]
Simon Migliano. 2018. Free VPN Apps: Chinese Ownership, Secretive Companies & Weak Privacy. Top10VPN (Dec 2018). https://www.top10vpn.com/ free-vpn-app-investigation
[40]
Ella Peltonen, Eemil Lagerspetz, Jonatan Hamberg, Abhinav Mehrotra, Mirco Musolesi, Petteri Nurmi, and Sasu Tarkoma. 2018. The hidden image of mobile apps: geographic, demographic, and cultural factors in mobile usage. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services. ACM, 10.
[41]
Suranga Seneviratne, Aruna Seneviratne, Mohamed Ali Kaafar, Anirban Mahanti, and Prasant Mohapatra. 2015. Early detection of spam mobile apps. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web. International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, 949--959.
[42]
Chongbin Tang, Sen Chen, Lingling Fan, Lihua Xu, Yang Liu, Zhushou Tang, and Liang Dou. 2019. A Large-Scale Empirical Study on Industrial Fake Apps. CoRR abs/1902.00647 (2019). arXiv:1902.00647 http://arxiv.org/abs/1902.00647
[43]
Haoyu Wang, Zhe Liu, Jingyue Liang, Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, Yao Guo, Li Li, Juan Tapiador, Jingcun Cao, and Guoai Xu. 2018. Beyond Google Play: A Large- Scale Comparative Study of Chinese Android App Markets. In Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference 2018 (IMC '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 293--307.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Out in the Open: On the Implementation of Mobile App Filtering in IndiaPassive and Active Measurement10.1007/978-3-031-56252-5_2(19-36)Online publication date: 20-Mar-2024
  • (2023)Website blocking in the European Union: Network interference from the perspective of Open InternetPolicy & Internet10.1002/poi3.36716:1(121-148)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2023
  • (2021)Constructing Sexual Fields: Chinese Gay Men’s Dating Practices Among Pluralized Dating AppsSocial Media + Society10.1177/205630512110090147:2Online publication date: 12-Apr-2021

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
UMAP'19 Adjunct: Adjunct Publication of the 27th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization
June 2019
455 pages
ISBN:9781450367110
DOI:10.1145/3314183
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 06 June 2019

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. app stores
  2. censorship
  3. china
  4. country availability
  5. mobile applications
  6. russia

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Conference

UMAP '19
Sponsor:

Acceptance Rates

UMAP'19 Adjunct Paper Acceptance Rate 30 of 122 submissions, 25%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 162 of 633 submissions, 26%

Upcoming Conference

UMAP '25

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)38
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)4
Reflects downloads up to 17 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Out in the Open: On the Implementation of Mobile App Filtering in IndiaPassive and Active Measurement10.1007/978-3-031-56252-5_2(19-36)Online publication date: 20-Mar-2024
  • (2023)Website blocking in the European Union: Network interference from the perspective of Open InternetPolicy & Internet10.1002/poi3.36716:1(121-148)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2023
  • (2021)Constructing Sexual Fields: Chinese Gay Men’s Dating Practices Among Pluralized Dating AppsSocial Media + Society10.1177/205630512110090147:2Online publication date: 12-Apr-2021

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media