A Preliminary Look into Unsolicited Mobile App Traffic

The number of smart devices keeps on growing every year, and with that the potential market for mobile apps. As of May 2016, Google Play hosted 2.6 million apps and had an accumulative total of 65 billion app downloads. Any developer can publish apps through Play, and it is quite prevalent to granting apps permission use the phone's network network interfaces at will and under very limited supervision (beyond overall traffic volume and bitwise access to an interface). This raises the following questions: can certain apps be harmful to users? Should we trust mobile developers to 'do no evil' in terms of the volume and type of traffic their apps generate? We are motivated to identify whether there is a need for more scrutiny on the connections apps make, especially when not in use.