Mobile applications have exploded in popularity over the last several years, with over one million Android applications available for download on the Google Play store right now. The relative ease of developing and releasing an application on an open platform like Android has made it a haven for developers around the world. Currently, a major issue facing open mobile platforms is the proliferation of applications with major defects, vulnerabilities, and other security issues. Developers release new versions of these applications periodically to fix issues and add new features, but often end up doing more harm than good.

The goal of this project is to gather application information from as many Android application package (APK) files and Android git source code repositories as possible in order to examine correlations between various quality metrics and security characteristics of the applications. We will examine how these correlations evolve over time as new versions of the applications are released. In particular, some of the metrics we looked at are adherence to coding standards, file size, lines of code, over and underpermissions, and any defects or security vulnerabilities that may exist.