Simandro-plus: On computing similarity of android applications

Abstract

In this paper, we propose SimAndro-Plus as an improved variant of the state-of-the-art method, SimAndro, to compute the similarity of Android applications (apps) regarding their functionalities. SimAndro-Plus has two major differences with SimAndro: 1) it exploits two beneficial features to similarity computa-tion, which are totally disregarded by SimAndro; 2) to compute the similarity score of an app-pair based on strings and package name features, SimAndro-Plus considers not only those terms co-appearing in both apps but also considers those terms appearing in one app while missing in the other one. The results of our extensive ex-periments with three real-world datasets and a dataset constructed by human experts demonstrate that 1) each of the two aforementioned differences is really effective to achieve better accuracy and 2) SimAndro-Plus outperforms SimAndro in similarity computation by 14% in average.