CALAPPA: a toolchain for mining Android applications

Software engineering researchers and practitioners working on the Android ecosystem frequently have to do the same tasks over and over: retrieve data from the Google Play store to analyze it, decompile the Dalvik bytecode to understand the behavior of the app, and analyze applications metadata and user reviews. In this paper we present CALAPPA, a highly reusable and customizable toolchain that allows researchers to easily run common analysis tasks on large Android application datasets. CALAPPA includes components to retrieve the data from different Android stores, and comes with a predefined, but extensible, set of modules that can analyze apps metadata and code.