DroidVisor: An Android secure application recommendation system

In current Android systems, the application recommendation function is an important feature that users can use to find a similar application to replace a targeted one. The current recommendation system provided through Google and the Google Play store presumably recommends applications similar to a target application while accounting for the popularity of each application. However, it does not take the security features of each application or users preferences into consideration when doing so. In this paper, we propose DroidVisor, an Android tool that provides users with fine-grained and customizable application recommendations. Compared to the Google store recommendation function, DroidVisor does not only use the similarity to a preselected target application, but also considers other metrics such as popularity, security, and usability. More specifically, DroidVisor provides an interface for users to configure the weight of each metric and a recommendation algorithm that generates a list of recommended applications based on the combined scores. We evaluate our proposed criteria and the quality of recommendation through use case studies. Finally, we present our findings through a discussion of accuracy as well as possible ways to improve our recommendation results.