App markets have evolved into highly competitive and dynamic environments for developers. While the traditional app life cycle involves incremental updates for feature enhancements and issue resolution, some apps deviate from this norm by undergoing significant transformations in their use cases or market positioning. We define this previously unstudied phenomenon as 'app metamorphosis'. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient multi-modal search methodology to identify apps undergoing metamorphosis and apply it to analyse two snapshots of the Google Play Store taken five years apart. Our methodology uncovers various metamorphosis scenarios, including re-births, re-branding, re-purposing, and others, enabling comprehensive characterisation. Although these transformations may register as successful for app developers based on our defined success score metric (e.g., re-branded apps performing approximately 11.3% better than an average top app), we shed light on the concealed security and privacy risks that lurk within, potentially impacting even tech-savvy end-users.

翻译：应用市场已演变为开发者之间高度竞争且动态变化的环境。虽然传统的应用生命周期涉及通过增量更新实现功能增强和问题修复，但部分应用偏离了这一常规模式，其用例或市场定位发生了显著转变。我们将这种先前未被研究的现象定义为"应用蜕变"。本文提出了一种新颖高效的多模态搜索方法，用于识别经历蜕变的应用，并将其应用于分析相隔五年采集的两个Google Play商店数据快照。我们的方法揭示了包括重生、品牌重塑、功能重构等在内的多种蜕变场景，实现了全面表征。尽管根据我们定义的成功评分指标（例如品牌重塑应用的表现平均优于顶级应用约11.3%），这些转型可能被记录为开发者的成功案例，但我们揭示了其中潜藏的隐秘安全与隐私风险，这些风险甚至可能影响精通技术的终端用户。