Recognizing Child Unsafe Apps Through User Reviews on the Google Play Store

Google Play Store serves as a platform to host, download, and review android applications. Many researchers have explored the user review section and worked on approaches and solutions that would prove a more effective pipeline to enable developer feedback on application issues and praised features proving the section’s abundance of information. This work uses this same data to attempt a novel use case of determining child unsafe apps on Google Play Store. User reviews are collected using a crawler and categorized for selected keywords relating to child, media, and India. Since Google Play Store does not provide a definitive number of downloads, this work attempts to mitigate this challenge by instead calculating the user density for an application. The user density helps establish the engagement users have with an application and is calculated by the difference in the timestamps of the most and least recent reviews divided by the sum of total reviews and its upvotes for an application. 60,620 reviews from 1,600 applications were extracted to validate the proposed concept. This concept has proved effective in recognizing applications that present child unsafe content while also offering a novel concept of calculating user density.