一句话：首个对 500 对 Android lite/full 应用的差分研究，揭示 lite 应用并未简化且反而放大安全风险。
该论文针对“Android lite 应用因功能更少而更安全”的假设，首次对 500 对 lite-full 应用进行系统差分研究。结果显示安全悖论：lite 应用 APK 中位大小比仅为 0.99，47.0% 甚至更大，却仍保留 71–91% 导出攻击面组件；发现 130 个 lite 特有崩溃，包括逻辑修改失败、校验遗漏与残留代码隐患，受影响应用至少有 6.331 亿次安装，物理设备复现至少 6/45 对出现 lite 专属致命启动失败；lite 应用更常声明或嵌入广告库，27.2% 引入 full 版本没有的危险权限。作者据此提出建议并公开数据集与分析工件。
Android lite apps are intended for resource-constrained environments and are commonly assumed to be safer because they expose less functionality than full-featured apps. However, recurring reports of crashes, broken features, and excessive advertising suggest that this assumption may be false. We present the first systematic differential study of Android lite apps on an artifact-complete cohort of 500 lite-full app pairs across a diverse set of app categories. The results reveal a fundamental security paradox: lite apps simplify little in practice, yet often inherit substantial risk from their full counterparts while introducing new problems of their own. On this unified 500-pair subset, the median APK size ratio is 0.99, yet 47.0% of lite apps are actually larger than their full counterparts, while still retaining 71–91% of exported attack-surface components. We further identify 130 unique lite-app crashes, including 61 logic modification failures, 40 validation omissions, and 29 residual code hazards. These failures are not confined to niche apps: the affected lite apps account for at least 633.1 million lower-bound installs in our retained market metadata, and physical-device replay reproduces immediate lite-only fatal launch failures in at least 6 of the 45 crash-app pairs whose lite and full APKs both install on a current device. The same pattern appears in the surrounding security ecosystem: lite apps more often declare ad support, embed ad libraries, and fall into our adware-only category than full apps. In addition, 27.2% of lite apps introduce dangerous permissions absent in their full counterparts. These findings indicate that lite apps often amplify, rather than reduce, risk for the users they are meant to serve, especially in emerging markets. We conclude with recommendations for developers, marketplaces, and researchers, and release our dataset and analysis artifacts to support future work on this underexplored threat landscape.
@inproceedings{paperbot12544,
title = {LiteScope: Revealing the Security Paradox of Android Lite Apps in Resource-Constrained Ecosystems},
author = {Yuanxiang Shi and Liangcai Su and Kai Ye and Xi Xiao and Chenxiong Qian},
booktitle = {ASE},
year = {2026},
doi = {10.1145/3832783.3834528}
}