# [APP] Research App - Win $10 Amazon GC



## cpsdevel (Dec 20, 2012)

Looking for volunteers - Win $10 Amazon GC!
Apologies if this is not the correct place to post, for cross-posting etc.

We are looking for volunteers that send us some of their usage data for research purposes. This is a Central Michigan University study with IRB approval, for those of you that are concerned about data privacy 

The collected data is a mix of the application UIDs on your device and the network statistics stored on the device by the Android OS (we tested on AOS 4+), i.e., what networks were used for what time by what app. No user-identification data is collected. You can double-check by looking into the files collected in the "/mnt/sdcard/cpsmobile" folder, which contains the data we collect.

You need a rooted device!

In Google Play Store search for *NetstatGatherer* OR use the following link:
play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=mobile.cps.cmich.edu.netstatgatherer

The app itself can submit the generated database file anonymousdly (not entering GC drawing), or you can click on the email button of the app - that opens the default email client with all files we'd like to look at as attachments.

*If you submit via the email option by Friday 12/31/2012, we enter you into a daily drawing for 3 $10 Amazon gift cards!*

Thanks for reading and/or helping us in our research efforts!!!


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## yarly (Jun 22, 2011)

I am mostly curious why this really needs root permissions? You can access quite a bit just from using reflection. Wouldn't make for very random statistical sample data if you're only collecting data from root users as their usage can vary dramatically from average users. Unless your tests are meant to study only root users.


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## cpsdevel (Dec 20, 2012)

yarly said:


> I am mostly curious why this really needs root permissions? You can access quite a bit just from using reflection. Wouldn't make for very random statistical sample data if you're only collecting data from root users as their usage can vary dramatically from average users. Unless your tests are meant to study only root users.


Yarly, AFAIK the underlying system statistics are saved in /data/system, which is not regularly accessible.


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## yarly (Jun 22, 2011)

Build.prop stuff? Most of that (but not all) can be accessed from the android sdk.


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## cpsdevel (Dec 20, 2012)

yarly said:


> Build.prop stuff? Most of that (but not all) can be accessed from the android sdk.


Yarly, not build.prop, but the actual usage data - close to running something as service in the back as Google does, this is the closes that I can get with and instant system snapshot. I know that this limits the sample size, but it would suffice for an initial dataset for evaluations...


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## yarly (Jun 22, 2011)

cpsdevel said:


> Yarly, not build.prop, but the actual usage data - close to running something as service in the back as Google does, this is the closes that I can get with and instant system snapshot. I know that this limits the sample size, but it would suffice for an initial dataset for evaluations...


Hmm, this might be useful to you then. Let me know. Also, you can get read access on /system, writing to it though requires root. It's /data that is the issue with no root though.

Data usage will definitely be skewed if you're only monitoring root users, as they're more likely to be tethering or doing other things that use excessive amounts of data than the average Android user. Lots of outliers and any hypothesis would be way off (unless you're only accounting for root users and making note that their data usage is usually higher than average users). Interesting study would be comparing usage of root users to those that do not. That would be something I'd like to see done or try myself.

I'm guessing this is for a school project or something? Just curious.


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## cpsdevel (Dec 20, 2012)

This is for a University research study, not necessarily linked to the actual usage amounts (say Wifi), but as you referenced, we're interested on the per-app behavior over time. And to get some of that data without requesting folks to install a monitoring app (which I think would be harder to convince people to install than a one-time app)...oh, well, that got me here ;-)
On a research note, we could argue that future common users might become close to the current early adopters 
I'd be interested in teaming up on this comparison question/


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## yarly (Jun 22, 2011)

cpsdevel said:


> This is for a University research study, not necessarily linked to the actual usage amounts (say Wifi), but as you referenced, we're interested on the per-app behavior over time. And to get some of that data without requesting folks to install a monitoring app (which I think would be harder to convince people to install than a one-time app)...oh, well, that got me here ;-)
> On a research note, we could argue that future common users might become close to the current early adopters
> I'd be interested in teaming up on this comparison question/


Oh you mean how much someone uses such and such app over time? I see what you mean. I figured you meant data usage, but that was probably just my own interest getting in the way as I find that more interesting, lol. There has to be a way to get usage data some undocumented in the Android API, because you can access it from #*#*INFO#*#* (or in the signal info app I made has a shortcut to that). Under there, you can see all the usage data for apps. Though I can see usage data for root users being odd, because many tend to wipe their system partitions quite a bit for updating and flashing new ROMs.

I might be interested, as long as you're not a student who would be getting graded on anything I might contribute (since that could be viewed as cheating by some institutions). As long as anything I might contribute is open sourced and posted somewhere like Github, then I'm not worried. I'm also paranoid about such things, so don't mind me 

I am curious though to how much usage mobile data those that root use versus those that don't, tablet users versus phone users, cellular data versus wifi, as well as average users in general without root users tied in. Such findings would be useful to publish (as well as the source for anyone to study and review) since carriers like Verizon claim people don't use much data at all, but I wonder how much they would use if they were using wifi at all. I'm guessing quite a bit, but no one will know until there is a large enough sample size.

Would also be useful to filter by country as well as usage probably varies by country and perhaps also by urban versus rural (though that's harder to deal with since I can't think of an easy way to filter that short of geolocation by postal code and filtering by that).

I was working on collecting signal usage from users in the little signal app I work on in my spare time, but haven't gotten to implementing that aspect yet. Though such code for data usage and signal strength collecting could probably be abstracted out somewhat so either app could share some code libraries so sort of a win win.

EDIT: https://github.com/a...UsageStats.java for reference on how to get app usage stats.


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## cpsdevel (Dec 20, 2012)

Yarly, actually, I am the prof helping out my student  I'll have him touch base with you after our semester starts next week.
Happy new One!


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## yarly (Jun 22, 2011)

cpsdevel said:


> Yarly, actually, I am the prof helping out my student  I'll have him touch base with you after our semester starts next week.
> Happy new One!


Ah, cool. Just curious.


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