An Analysis of Android Web App Manifest

Nowadays, mobile applications are provided in several types. One type of mobile applications is mobile web application manifest (a standard of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)). It is based on manifest metadata that enables developers to include metadata information about a web application into JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) datatype file. Such information provides developers with the capability to declare properties in order to control the behavior of web applications. For example, the manifest file may specify a labeled icon for an application when it is added to the home screen of a device. In this paper, we statically analyze a large dataset of JSON metadata files that we collected from mobile web applications. Our analysis includes some of the sub-properties from the collected metadata files such as display, background_color, icons, lang, orientation, permissions, and theme_color. Our results highlight most commonly used features and properties in mobile web applications.