Understanding Incentivized Mobile App Installs on Google Play Store
Open accessAbstract
"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.
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ASO workers lack interest in the apps that they promote.
“Our work is partially motivated by Farooqi et al. [38]'s finding that ASO workers lack interest in the apps that they promote.”
From RacketStore (2021) · cites this paper as [38]
Section 3.2 (p. 5) says that most users who installed the study’s app were likely not genuinely interested in it and appeared to install it for the payout. That supports the claim’s central point, but the paper hedges its inference and concerns users in incentivized-install campaigns, rather than establishing that ASO workers generally lack interest in the apps they promote. (LLM, conf=0.85)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredFarooqi et al. [38] have shown that incentivized app install platforms (IIP) are able to provide thousands of installs that successfully evade Google defenses.
“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.”
From RacketStore (2021) · cites this paper as [38]
Section 3.2 (pp. 4–5) reports 1,679 incentivized installs for the authors’ test app and an increase in its public Google Play install count from 0 to 1,000. Section 5.2 (p. 11) says these results suggest Google’s detection and filtering may fail; it does not establish that thousands of installs successfully evaded Google’s defenses. (LLM, conf=0.86)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
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Cited by
Sorted by citations
Hernandez, N., Recabarren, R., Carbunar, B., & Ahmed, S. I. (2021) · Proceedings of the 21st ACM Internet Measurement Conference · doi:10.1145/3487552.3487837 · Cited by 3 · see citing works
“Our work is partially motivated by Farooqi et al. [38]’s finding that ASO workers lack interest in the apps that they promote.”
BackgroundMethodInfluential
- Authors
- Farooqi, S., Feal, Á., Lauinger, T., McCoy, D., Shafiq, Z., & Vallina-Rodriguez, N.
- Affiliations
- University of Iowa (US)
- IMDEA Networks (ES)
- New York University (US)
- University of California, Davis (US)
- IMDEA Networks Institute/ICSI
- Venue
- Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2020-10-27
- Pages
- 696-709
- OpenAlex
- W3091580460
- Cited by
- 22
- References
- 19
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 4 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 1
- FWCI
- 2.46
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- arxiv.org
- Locations
- ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) (publishedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
- IMDEA Networks Institute Digital Repository (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation (1564329, 1715152, 1814816, and 1954224)
- European Union's Horizon 2020 Innovation Action Program (786741)
- Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PID2019-111429RB-C22)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Spam and Phishing Detection
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Mobile and Web Applications
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Strategy and Management › Digital Platforms and Economics
- Keywords
- Google Play Store, Android application, in-app purchases, user engagement metrics, app store rankings, venture financing
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