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Automatic Maturity Rating for Android Apps

Published: 15 September 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Nowadays, various apps greatly facilitate children’s lives and studies, while some apps also make illegal and inappropriate content (e.g., gambling, pornography) more accessible to children and adolescents. As the primary source of apps, several app markets adopt maturity ratings for apps, enabling users to distinguish whether apps are age-appropriate. However, if an incorrectly-rated app is acquired by users who are not of the appropriate age, it will bring severe consequences, especially for children. Giving an accurate maturity rating to an app can be time-consuming, both for developers and app market reviewers, while automatic rating tools can help solve this problem. Existing work on automatic app maturity ratings only analyzes app metadata obtained from app markets, but does not systematically consider the features of the apps themselves. In this work, we extract app features from both the app market and the apps themselves. We train machine learning models on Google Play, the official Android app market which has maturity ratings, and propose a cost-effective feature combination that achieves 96.98% accuracy, 96.21% precision, and 97.80% recall on within-market testing, and achieves 88.74% accuracy, 98.75% precision, and 83.72% recall on cross-market testing. Also, our method outperforms existing tools on every common metric.

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Cited By

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  • (2025)Automatic classification of mobile apps to ensure safe usage for adolescentsPLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.031395320:1(e0313953)Online publication date: 16-Jan-2025
  • (2024)Exploring the Feasibility and Acceptability of Technological Interventions to Prevent Adolescents’ Exposure to Online Pornography: Qualitative ResearchJMIR Pediatrics and Parenting10.2196/586847(e58684)Online publication date: 5-Nov-2024
  • (2024)Element and Event-Based Test Suite Reduction for Android Test Suites Generated by Reinforcement Learningundefined10.12794/metadc2356236Online publication date: Jul-2024

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      cover image ACM Other conferences
      Internetware '22: Proceedings of the 13th Asia-Pacific Symposium on Internetware
      June 2022
      291 pages
      ISBN:9781450397803
      DOI:10.1145/3545258
      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].

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      Publication History

      Published: 15 September 2022

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      Author Tags

      1. Android
      2. Machine Learning
      3. Maturity Rating
      4. Mobile Apps

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      View all
      • (2025)Automatic classification of mobile apps to ensure safe usage for adolescentsPLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.031395320:1(e0313953)Online publication date: 16-Jan-2025
      • (2024)Exploring the Feasibility and Acceptability of Technological Interventions to Prevent Adolescents’ Exposure to Online Pornography: Qualitative ResearchJMIR Pediatrics and Parenting10.2196/586847(e58684)Online publication date: 5-Nov-2024
      • (2024)Element and Event-Based Test Suite Reduction for Android Test Suites Generated by Reinforcement Learningundefined10.12794/metadc2356236Online publication date: Jul-2024

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