Reliable historical price data for Google Play apps and in-app purchases

Identify a reliable source of historical price data for Google Play paid apps and in-app purchases to enable analyses that require past pricing information, rather than relying solely on latest-version metadata from Google Play.

Background

To compare modded apps with their official counterparts, the paper relies on exact and non-exact, latest-available matches from Google Play. When analyzing pricing (for paid apps and IAPs), the authors used the latest version metadata because they could not obtain historical pricing information. This limits revenue-related analyses that depend on time-varying prices and past sales conditions.

A reliable historical price source would allow more accurate estimation of developer revenue loss and market impacts over time, complementing the ModZoo dataset and enabling longitudinal pricing analyses.