[bentcorner]

Condensed:

https://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/pm/P... and https://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/pm/P... provide a list of installed applications on the phone. These APIs are silent to the user.

The study analyzed apps available on the Google Play Store, and compared two lists of apps: Open-source apps (via https://androidtimemachine.github.io/), and non-open-source free apps (the top 500 free apps for each category in the play store). The non-open-source apps were the most common users of these APIs. Additionally, most of the time the callers of these APIs in non-open-source apps are advertising related libraries.