The Android market contains over 30,000 apps. Many of them are very cool additions for your phone, but there's also a fair share of low quality ones. Because it's so easy to launch apps on Android, some developers flood the market with lots of nearly identical apps which have little functionality.
When looking for good apps, these spam apps can really get in the way. I was recently searching for an app to track tennis game results. A number of results I got were by a developer who put 580 applications in the market. These apps are probably just meant to make a quick buck, as they don't have much functionality and all have low ratings.
On AppBrain these results are now just shown as light grey lines. If you're interested in them, you can still click them to get the full search result.
This improvement makes searching for apps on AppBrain even more enjoyable and lets you find the best apps faster.
Mathijs for the AppBrain team.
How we did it
We calculated statistics on all developers in the AppBrain database, which covers all apps that are available in the US. In total there were 28,936 apps created by 7,429 developers. Even though the average number of apps per developer was just 3.9, there were 32 developers who launched more than 100 apps in the Android Market. The number of developers grouped by their number of apps launched is shown in the figure below.
We used the ratings given by users to categorize apps as good (rating over 4 stars), average (between 3 and 4 stars), bad (lower than 3 stars) or too few ratings to decide.
The following figure shows apps broken down by quality for each developer output category:
Even though the high-output developers are few in number, they produce a giant proportion of all apps. These apps are often too unpopular to have a rating at all, and if they have, they're less likely to be rated well. However, not all high volume developers are spammers. Two counterexamples are for instance Better Android and K-J Themes. They both have published more than 100 apps, and they're almost all rated quite well.
After some experimentation we let both the fraction of bad apps and the fraction of very unpopular apps determine whether a developer is regarded as spamming the market. The 359 developers that were marked as spammers published over 10,000 apps. There are almost no good apps among those 10K, this means that the overall percentage of very good apps is bumped up from nearly 14% of all apps to well over 20% in our non-filtered set.
Summary
- We analyzed all 28,936 apps created by 7,429 developers.
- 25% of all apps are produced by only 32 app developers (0.4 % of all developers).- Removing 359 spammers (who in total made over 10,000 apps) boosts the fraction of good apps in the market by 52%.
About AppBrain
AppBrain (http://www.appbrain.com) aims to provide the easiest and fastest way to get and share Android apps. The website is paired with an Android app (AppBrain Market Sync) for easy syncing between website and phone. AppBrain provides personalized app recommendations, fast and relevant search and browsing of other users’ installed apps.
AppBrain is developed by AppTornado GmbH, a leading Android developer team based in Zürich, Switzerland.
27 comments:
APPBRAIN YOU ARE AWESOME!!
I have been waiting soooo long to send these spammers to the trash bin. It's high time they got the back seat they deserve. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart. I am going to tell everyone about AppBrain.
I would only take it one step further and hide them entirely, because now there are some pages in the browse list that are entirely grayed out. But I'm not complaining!
great job guys!
At long last! The Market has needed some kind of spam filtering ever since the beginning. Kudos for a job well done.
Very helpful. Even better would be a button to "Block this developer from my listings"
how about new apps? i see they become grey :(
coz no downlod and no stars
@Biji, new apps are only filtered out when the developer was already marked as a spam developer because of apps he wrote earlier.
Can you add filters to app brain?
For example "Never show me applications from this developer again" ?
Great, now we only need sort options :)
You should do this again using only data from the previous month. I'm curious to know what the current rate of spam is. I bet it's more than 1/3...
Its a good move - its however bad you explain how you do it, since they will now try to circumvent that.
Its a pity the world has to content with greedy idiots like that - but i guess its better than the censorship of the apple store
Are the spam apps removed from the rss feed of new applications? If not, is there an alternate feed where they are?
Any chance you can filter spam in app feedback comments?
So hide any comment that contains characters that do not form a known word. This will get rid of all the PE referral code spam becuase the contain codes like 7h8yt. While at the same time retaining genuine feedback comments.
Hmmm is it deliberate to be filtering all the ebooks from O'Reilly Media (probably the best respected tech book publisher out there) as spam ?
TED Mobile is being filtered out & is certainly *not* spam.
I've been marked as a spam developer ?
What do i need to do to get out of the blacklist ?
Google should mark application as spam not the developer. many applications from the same developer are btter
This is a good idea but its implementation needs to be refined. Don't show the greyed out bad apps in amongs the good ones. For example in an app category page, there might be 2 'good' apps and like 10 'bad' greyed out ones, which means you only see 2 'worthwhile apps' for this whole page.
Then I click next page and all the apps there are 'bad' greyed out ones, so its like a useless blank page. Have the option to completely filter out these apps so they dont take up space in number of results per page
Agree with Finn, also stuff like Lonely Planet should not be filtered as well.
I've only released 4 apps but they are all greyed out on here. Am I considered a spam developer? One of the apps has no ratings but the others are at 4 stars or above.
Same here, I have 4 apps on the market, 2 of which were released within the last week. They may not have many ratings yet, but they are definitely not spam. Where can I complain?
When I tried to click on any of the grayed apps today, nothing happened for any of them. I have clicked on them in the past on the same computer to see the app. Please fix.
Click to Show is NOT WORKING!! Please fix urgently!!
Ok so I have ~80 published over a 2 year period. Some are basically the same with variations in theme done at customer requests. So does that make me a spammer, I think not. Yet your system has tagged me as such.
I totally agree with your filtering however I respectfully request that you rethink your strategy so that you aren't fragging legitimate developers.
DaniCo
is anyone at appbrain paying attention ??
O'Reilly Media is listed as a spammer, it seems many legit other developers are as well.
also you cant click the link to display it.
NICE
Good idea. Flawed implementation. All that shows up when you click on one of the hidden apps is a page that says "false". This is is both IE and Firefox, with and without noscript.
@Mark: Thanks for reporting, this is fixed now
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