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Android App Usage History

07/11/2025 Friday

Android App Usage History tracks the usage of apps on the device. It tracks launches, time spent in the foreground, and configuration changes; just ideal for rebuilding user activity and app habits.

Digital Forensics Values of Android App Usage History

From this artifact, the user is able to determine:

• Apps that ran, how and how often (Foreground time)
• Timelines of timestamp of usage and configuration events.
• Component/class names that were invoked (e.g. specific activities).
• Usage is summarized according to interval (daily/weekly/monthly/yearly) to identify patterns.

Location of Android App Usage History Artifacts

Android App Usage History artifacts can be found at the following locations:

/data/system_ce/<user_id>/usagestats/ (subfolders: daily/, weekly/, monthly/, yearly/)

Analyzing Android App Usage History Artifact with ArtiFast

This section will discuss how to use ArtiFast to extract Android App Usage History artifacts from Android machines’ files and what kind of digital forensics insights we can gain from the artifact.

After you have created your case and added evidence for the investigation, at the Artifact Selection phase, you can select Android App Usage History artifact parsers:

Once ArtiFast parsers plugins complete processing the artifact for analysis, it can be reviewed via “Artifact View” or “Timeline View,” with indexing, filtering, and searching capabilities. Below is a detailed description of Android App Usage History artifacts in ArtiFast.

Android App Usage History

• Frequency: The reporting period of the record.
• Event Type: The type of usage event recorded.
• Usage Type: The category of usage state.
• Package Name: The unique identifier of the app.
• Class Name: The name of the invoked app component class.
• Component Name: The full component path (package/class).
• Times Launched: The number of launches.
• Total Active Time: The time spent active in the foreground.

For more information or suggestions please contact: hamzamm.aljaeba@forensafe.com