Just a few days ago I reviewed AppBrain, an application/online market/app sync tool. Overall, I found it an easy and very useful program to have, though there was room for improvement. AppBrain went to class and became a little smarter. Searches now filter out spam apps, these results are now just shown as light grey lines. If you’re interested in them, you can still click them to get the full search result.
Hurray, no more spam, but how did they do it?
We calculated statistics on all developers in the AppBrain database, which covers all apps that are available in the US. In total there were 28,936 apps created by 7,429 developers. Even though the average number of apps per developer was just 3.9, there were 32 developers who launched more than 100 apps in the Android Market.
After some experimentation we let both the fraction of bad apps and the fraction of very unpopular apps determine whether a developer is regarded as spamming the market. The 359 developers that were marked as spammers published over 10,000 apps. There are almost no good apps among those 10K, this means that the overall percentage of very good apps is bumped up from nearly 14% of all apps to well over 20% in our non-filtered set.
I was pretty much sold on the benefits of AppBrain, and now with spam filtering, looking for that app I want will be a bit easier. It will be interesting to see what AppBrain learns next. You can read the whole breakdown on the filtering process on their blog.
[Source AppBrain]
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Finally! The android Market has needed spam filtering since the beginning! Now if we could make custom filters…
Finally! The android Market has needed spam filtering since the beginning! Now if we could make custom filters…
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