Exploring ChatGPT App Ecosystem: Distribution, Deployment and Security

Smart Home has achieved remarkable developments over the past few decades. In the ICT(Information and Communications Technology) field, 'app ecosystem'-a collection of multiple devices such as mobile phones and tablets, software (operating system and development tools), companies (manufacturers, carriers, app-stores, etc.) and the process through which data is transferred/shared by a user from one device to another device or by the device itself-has come into wide use since the advent of the smart phone. Due to the synergy effect of the 'app ecosystem', it has been applied to various fields such as televisions and automobile industries. As a result, both the Smart TV and connected vehicle have developed their own ecosystem. Although much research has been conducted on these two ecosystems, there is a lack of research regarding 'App Ecosystem based Smart Home' (AESH). This research focuses on the building scenarios based on 'Tracking, Analyzing, Imaging, Deciding, and Acting (T.A.I.D.A), a future prediction method process. Rather than taking an approach from the perspective of providing and applying advanced technology for research on building future scenarios, this paper focuses on research from the perspective of architectural planning. As a result, two future scenarios of AESH are suggested.

The modern computing landscape contains an increasing number of app ecosystems, where users store personal data on platforms such as Facebook or smartphones. APIs enable third-party applications (apps) to utilize that data. A key concern associated with app ecosystems is the confidentiality of user data.In this paper, we develop a new model of disclosure in app ecosystems. In contrast with previous solutions, our model is data-derived and semantically meaningful. Information disclosure is modeled in terms of a set of distinguished security views. Each query is labeled with the precise set of security views that is needed to answer it, and these labels drive policy decisions.We explain how our disclosure model can be used in practice and provide algorithms for labeling conjunctive queries for the case of single-atom security views. We show that our approach is useful by demonstrating the scalability of our algorithms and by applying it to the real-world disclosure control system used by Facebook.

The continuing expansion of mobile app ecosystems has attracted lots of efforts from the research community. However, although a large number of research studies have focused on analyzing the corpus of mobile apps and app markets, little is known at a comprehensive level on the evolution of mobile app ecosystems. Because the mobile app ecosystem is continuously evolving over time, understanding the dynamics of app ecosystems could provide unique insights that cannot be achieved through studying a single static snapshot. In this paper, we seek to shed light on the dynamics of mobile app ecosystems. Based on 5.3 million app records (with both app metadata and apks) collected from three snapshots of Google Play over more than three years, we conduct the first study on the evolution of app ecosystems from different aspects. Our results suggest that although the overall ecosystem shows promising progress in regard of app popularity, user ratings, permission usage and privacy policy declaration, there still exists a considerable number of unsolved issues including malicious apps, update issues, third-party tracking threats, improper app promotion behaviors, and spamming/malicious developers. Our study shows that understanding the evolution of mobile app ecosystems can help developers make better decision on developing and releasing apps, provide insights for app markets to identifying misbehaviors, and help mobile users to choose desired apps.

A computational comparison study of Western and Chinese literature on journalism studies after 2010 shows that Chinese literature pays more attention to journalistic practices, norms and polices. Instead of 'digital journalism', 'media convergence' is a popular and widely used term in China that refers to the digital transformation of Chinese journalism. The transformation of legacy news media in China occurs at two levels: ideational, such as news values, norms, journalists' roles and identity; and organizational, such as newsroom structure, routines and the news production process. Platforms have infiltrated our everyday life, resulting in what scholars refer to as the platformization of society. Platformization can be defined as 'the penetration of economic, governmental, and infrastructural extensions of digital platforms into the web and app ecosystems'. In the past two decades, under increasing economic pressure, the news industry is experiencing journalism crises due to declining circulations and advertising revenues.

With the increasing diversity of mobile apps, users install many apps in their smartphones and often use several apps together to meet a specific requirement. Because of the evolution of user habits and app functions, the set of apps using at the same time, i.e., app usage context, may change over time, which represents the dynamic correlation of different apps and even the evolution trend of the whole app ecosystem. Therefore, understanding how an apps usage context changes over time is very meaningful. In this paper, based on a seven-year app usage dataset, we explore the long-term app usage context dynamics and understand the underlying reasons and influence factors behind. Specifically, we build app co-occurrence graphs in different periods and learn app embeddings accordingly by leveraging graph embedding algorithm. We then measure the change of app usage context by the distance between neighboring app embeddings. As for the whole app ecosystem, we find that the change rate of app usage context undergoes up and down phrases, and varies in different app-categories. Furthermore, we explore three influence factors correlated with such dynamics. These results will be helpful for stakeholders to better understand the evolution of mobile users app usage behavior.

The popular short-form video app TikTok is mainly discussed as a discrete app or in relation to its parent company ByteDance. This view neglects how TikTok and other ByteDance apps maintain and advance ByteDance’s highly complex app ecosystem. This paper, therefore, positions ByteDance-owned apps as both apps and “platform tools.” TikTok allows end-users to watch videos, allows creators to make and distribute content, advertisers to endorse products, and developers to build app features. As a platform tool, TikTok is a software-based resource that mediates “platformization,” extending TikTok’s economic, infrastructural, and governmental data-centric logic within and beyond ByteDance’s app ecosystem. Increasingly, ByteDance’s platform tools rely heavily on AI technology because of ByteDance’s early investments in AI technology and the growing interest such tools within the cultural industries. We survey ByteDance’s AI-powered platform tools alongside non-AI ones using systematic financial and infrastructural analysis, uncovering how ByteDance’s platform tools expand ByteDance as a “multi-sided,” “multi-layered,” and “multi-situated” platform. Platform tools, thus, facilitate growth along these three dimensions by encouraging platform dependence; interoperability and interdependence within ByteDance’s app ecosystem; and platformization, including “parallel platformization.” Our empirical work ultimately shows how ByteDance uses platform tools to accrue and operationalize infrastructural and economic power, and how apps have moved from discrete objects to interconnected clusters of platform tools.

This article provides an exploratory systematic mapping of the global ecosystem of COVID-19 pandemic response apps. After considering policy updates by Google Play’s and Apple’s App Store, we analyse all the available response apps in July 2020;their different response types;the apps’ developers and geographical distribution;the ecosystem’s ‘generativity’ and developers’ responsiveness during the unfolding pandemic;the apps’ discursive positioning;and material conditions of their development. Google and Apple are gatekeepers of these app ecosystems and exercise control on different layers, shaping the pandemic app response as well as the relationships between governments, citizens, and other actors. We suggest that this global ecosystem of pandemic responses reflects an exceptional mode of what we call ‘pandemic platform governance’, where platforms have negotiated their commercial interests and the public interest in exceptional circumstances. © 2021, Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. All rights reserved.

The ecosystem of apps and software integrated with certified health information technology.

Software architectural principles in contemporary mobile software: from conception to practice

With the evolution of mobile devices and app eco system, all major content providers develop services in native apps and web-apps. Web-apps have an inherent advantage of platform independent and uniform experience across devices, but the page load time, battery usage, and bandwidth consumption have to be improved. To solve some of these issues, there has been an introduction of Progressive Web Apps (PWA) by content providers. PWA apps use an effective caching policy on web resources based on its property. But the webpages are overwhelmingly non-PWA compliant. There is a need for non-PWA web pages to be effective in bandwidth utilization so that we can avoid the exchange of needless resources. This paper proposes a new method to inject a service worker into a webpage at Proxy Servers. This service worker is packaged along with non-PWA webpage as a response to web browser requests. The web engine then runs the service worker to identify stale web resources which in turn will be helpful to avoid transfer of redundant web resources. The proposed approach was evaluated using top 25 Non-PWA sites from Alexa 100 websites for one month. It saved an average of 25% data traffic and also provided an offline experience of these websites. This proposal can be further extended to create a generalized framework for seamlessly converting Non-PWA apps to PWA apps.

A systematic literature review: Opinion mining studies from mobile app store user reviews

We study the impact of the implementation of Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework on the Apple App Store ecosystem. We use comprehensive data on every app available in both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store ecosystems in the eighteen-month period around the implementation of ATT, and a difference-in-differences analysis to investigate whether the introduction of the privacy transparency framework affected the incentives for developers in the Apple ecosystem to create new apps, update their existing apps, or withdraw from the market. We also leverage data on the presence of Software Development Kits (SDK) in a select number of apps in each ecosystem to study how developers adapted specific functionalities in their products, such as the use of advertising platforms or payment systems. We find that the number of available apps in the Apple App Store ecosystem quickly recovers after an initial drop following the introduction of ATT. When analyzing the use of SDKs, we find a reduction in the use of Monetization and Ad Mediation SDKs, and an increase in the use of Authentication and Payments SDKs. Our results suggest developers did not withdraw from the market after ATT and instead adapted to operate under the conditions of a more protective privacy framework.

Review of Yus (2022): Smartphone Communication: Interactions in the App Ecosystem

The proliferation of mobile devices and apps together with the increasing public interest in privacy and data protection matters necessitate a more careful precaution for legal compliance. As apps are becoming more popular, app developers can expect an increased scrutiny of privacy practices in the future. In this paper, we focus on the problem of the disclosure of personal data to third parties and the role of app developers to enhance user privacy and data protection in the app ecosystem. We discuss the EU data protection principles and apply them to the mobile app context. We then derive requirements and guidelines for app developers on how to contribute to the protection of their users’ data.

This panel offers a reflection on the evolution and transformations of apps and app studies over the past decade, emphasizing how apps have seamlessly integrated into our daily routines and shaped our cultural and economic landscape. This process, known as ‘appification’, involves integrating various aspects of daily life and activities into mobile applications, fundamentally altering how we communicate, access information, make payments, and use digital services (Dieter et al., 2019; Goggin, 2021; Morris and Murray, 2018). Research in app studies has evolved in multiple directions during this time to analyse the implications of appification. This has included examining how app interfaces and features influence social, cultural, and economic practices, employing methods such as the walkthrough method or feature analysis (Hasinoff & Bivens, 2021; Light et al., 2018). Additionally, there has been a focus on the technical and material dimensions of the data infrastructures in which apps are situated (Gerlitz et al., 2019). Simultaneously, the emergence of new app genres, like ‘super apps’, which combine features, services, and practices in unique ways, has transformed apps into platforms for further development. However, this evolution also raises methodological questions on researching and contextualizing change over time (Helmond & van der Vlist, 2021). The evolving and dynamic nature of apps, accordingly, necessitates a continuous need for critical reflection on the methods used to study apps and the phenomenon of appification. The panel explores the concept of appification through various lenses, including governance and safety measures in dating apps, the complexities of app-based authentication, the global rise of super-apps and their historical evolution in the Chinese context, and the integration of AI technologies into mobile and enterprise applications. Methodologically, the panel showcases diverse strategies to explore appification, such as the walkthrough method, creating research personas, decompiling and debugging app software packages, historical analysis using app repositories, and analysing mini-apps and app store inventories. Together, these studies provide insight into emerging approaches for understanding appification going forward and how apps are reshaping interactions, governance, and technology integration across different domains and cultural contexts. All five papers in this panel engage with the concept of appification, which entails the integration of various aspects of daily life into mobile applications, fundamentally changing how we communicate, access information, conduct transactions, and use digital services. The first paper employs the walkthrough method to explore how dating apps shape the notion of ‘safety’ through their policies and technological features, shedding light on how safety measures are often traded for data and how these apps normalise surveillance practices. The second paper investigates the appification of dating by examining Tinder’s authentication mechanisms, revealing the complexities of user interactions and data exchanges within the app ecosystem. Advancing the field of app studies, the panel thus explores methodological strategies and conceptual frameworks to address the nuances of appification. The third paper maps out the global landscape of ‘super apps’ and theorises the process of ‘super-appification’, where apps extend beyond their traditional boundaries to offer a wide range of features and services, reshaping user engagement and corporate expansion. A comparative historiography of prominent Chinese super apps forms the basis of the fourth paper, tracing their evolution, features, and strategies driving their dominance. Lastly, the fifth paper examines the emerging ecosystems of AI apps, exploring their infrastructural features and relationships. Together, these studies provide a comprehensive overview of the ongoing transformations in the mobile ecosystem and the appification process, highlighting the crucial role of app features in shaping social interactions and corporate strategies.