of Android Apps and Their Metadata for the Research Community'
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Introduction
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Mobile app development has witnessed an unprecedented growth in recent years due to the increase in affordability and adoption of smart powerful handheld devices. In particular, the Android ecosystem, with its open Operating System and the available Software Development Kit, have empowered developers to produce millions of apps for diverse user tasks, ranging from emails and games to payment and health activities. Unlike the few established traditional desktop applications which have been thoroughly studied by the research community, Android apps are legion, each having a large share of user base. Analysing these apps at a large scale is however challenging since market maintainers implement several restrictions in collecting apps. In this context, researchers proceed in the best effort way to reuse small datasets (which are generally obsolete) or collect a limited number of samples (which may not be representative), leading to studies which may be biased and experiments which are often not reproducible. To address the problem of Android dataset collection, we have invested in a long-term effort to crawl apps for the research community. After several years of crawling, we have already stored over five million 