Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
 
 

code

README.md

Running the code

Requirements

The only requirement of this project is a working Python 3 installation (version >3.5 should be enough). At the moment the code has been tested only on MacOS Catalina 10.15 running the following version of Python

Python 3.7.3 (default, Sep 18 2019, 14:29:06)
[Clang 11.0.0 (clang-1100.0.33.8)] on darwin

Install

Run the following commands in your Terminal to download the covid-apps-observer source code and to install the needed dependencies:

$ # Clone the source code of covid-apps-observer 
$ git clone https://github.com/iivanoo/covid-apps-observer.git

$ # Move into the project's directory
$ cd covid-apps-observer

$ # Setup the virtual environment for the project, so that you do not interfere with the other 
$ # Python configurations in your machine
$ virtualenv -p python3 venv
$ # Activate the just created virtual environment
$ source venv/bin/activate

$ # Move into the code directory
$ cd code

$ # Install all the required packages
$ python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

$ # Install the aapt utility (it is used for unpacking XAPK files
$ sudo apt install aapt # Linux
$ brew tap caskroom/cask ; brew cask install android-sdk # MacOS

Usage

After all requirements are correctly installed, check the contents of one of the data/data-<COUNTRY>/apps.json files. It contains a minimal set of metadata referring to the Android apps you want to analyze. An apps.json has the following structure:

[
    {
        "id": "com.company.app", // the Package identifier of the app to be analyze
        "store_country": "it", // the country of the Google Play store page of the app
        "store_lang": "it", // the language of the Google Play store page of the app
        "latest_crawled_version": "1.5", // [not needed in the first run, it is automatically generated], 
        // it is the last version of the app crawled by covid-apps-observer 
        "latest_crawl": 1588275552 // [not needed in the first run, it is automatically generated], 
        // it is the timestamp in which the app has been crawled the last time 
    },
    // ...
]

If you want to analyze different apps, you will need to do the following:

  • create a new directory (for example, my_data) which will contain all the apps you will analyze and their related data
  • Create the my_data/apps.json file according to your needs

The rest is automatically managed by the tool.

Finally, you can launch the covid-apps-observer by running its main script as shown below.

$ python covid-apps-observer.py -i <path to the my_data directory> -an <your name> -ae <your email address>

This will take quite some time in the first run since it will download the following data for each Android app specified in the apps.json file, specifically:

  • the Google Play metadata (i.e., what you see when you browse the Google Play webpage of a mobile app)
  • the latest NUM_REVIEWS user reviews of the app (as specified in the configuration.py file)
  • the APK file of the app
  • Images containing the icon of the apps and their screenshots

Moreover, a set of analyses is also executed for extracting and aggregating other information about the apps, such as their Android activities, used libraries, etc.

The final output of the analysis is a Markdown file called report_<CURRENT_DATE>.md contained into the folder my_data folder.

Contributions

Any feedback, questions, and improvements about the project are very welcome, feel free to create an issue or pull request directly in this GitHub repository.

License

This software is licensed under the MIT License.