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Android apps or Android Application Packages (APKs) are commonly distributed through official app stores, but a significant parallel ecosystem of APK mirror sites has emerged, providing users with alternative access to APK packages. These mirror sites host APKs for direct download and sideloading, bypassing security checks typical of official stores and offering access to packages otherwise unavailable to some users. Despite their growing prominence, academic researchers have underexplored the APK mirror ecosystem. In this paper, we analyzed metadata from over 34M versions of approximately 27M unique Android packages collected from seven prominent APK mirror sites, alongside data from the Google Play Store and Amazon Appstore for comparison. Our findings reveal substantial variation in catalog size and package versioning across mirror sites. The smallest, APK Mirror, has only 17K packages while the largest, APK Combo, hosts over 12M packages, compared to Google Play Store’s 3.1M packages, at the time of measurement. Mirror sites differ markedly from official stores in both breadth - hosting more unique packages - and depth - retaining multiple package versions, often serving as semi-historical archives. This offers a potentially rich record for researchers to access.

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This page is a summary of: Mirror Mirror on the Wall, which APK Mirror Site is the Largest of Them All?, October 2025, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3730567.3764499.
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