Detecting plagiarism in cross-platform mobile applications: Case study: Game application similarity in Symbian platform and Android platform

Abstract

The development of mobile platform applications is increasing significantly since the rapid growth of mobile operating system and the high ability of mobile computing performance. Many mobile application developers nowadays work on a project to be implemented in a different mobile OS environment. The cross-platform applications are now becoming one of the advantages to be achieved by developers to sell their products to mobile platform users. The ease of access to the applications through the app-market leads rogue developers to try an illegal application platform-porting and illegal reuse of source codes that leads to plagiarism and infringement of intellectual property rights. In this paper, we discuss on how to analyze two different mobile application platforms that suspected as illegal platform-porting with a case study in mobile gaming application on the Symbian OS environment and the Android OS environment. The result shows that even two applications deployed on a different mobile OS environment by different developer, based on our study case investigation using lexical and structured approach, we found that infringes on intellectual property rights does exist.