  China is one of the largest Android markets in the world. As Chinese users
cannot access Google Play to buy and install Android apps, a number of
independent app stores have emerged and compete in the Chinese app market. Some
of the Chinese app stores are pre-installed vendor-specific app markets (e.g.,
Huawei, Xiaomi and OPPO), whereas others are maintained by large tech companies
(e.g., Baidu, Qihoo 360 and Tencent). The nature of these app stores and the
content available through them vary greatly, including their trustworthiness
and security guarantees.
  As of today, the research community has not studied the Chinese Android
ecosystem in depth. To fill this gap, we present the first large-scale
comparative study that covers more than 6 million Android apps downloaded from
16 Chinese app markets and Google Play. We focus our study on catalog
similarity across app stores, their features, publishing dynamics, and the
prevalence of various forms of misbehavior (including the presence of fake,
cloned and malicious apps). Our findings also suggest heterogeneous developer
behavior across app stores, in terms of code maintenance, use of third-party
services, and so forth. Overall, Chinese app markets perform substantially
worse when taking active measures to protect mobile users and legit developers
from deceptive and abusive actors, showing a significantly higher prevalence of
malware, fake, and cloned apps than Google Play.
