The pursuit of ´appiness: Exploring Android market download behaviour in a nationwide cellular network

Mobile devices are now part of our everyday lives, and the emergence of online application marketplaces allow a rapid spread of new mobile applications to a large user base. Such user-installed mobile applications constitute a large part of our daily interaction with the devices. With more than one million available applications, Android Market, the online catalog for Android devices allows users to choose and download a large selection of disparate applications. Analysing and characterising the application marketplace download patterns provides a better insight on the needs and behaviour of users In this paper, we explore a large dataset collected by a major European telecom operator to study the downloads of Android applications on a nationwide scale. Our findings include that more than 43% of the application data downloaded is for games, and that a set of only 10 GB of applications is responsible for 88% of the 45 TB downloaded in total by all the users.