Third-party applications have taken the smartphone community by storm. Most smartphone owners have more than one app on their device that they rely on to chat, game, get directions, or share pictures. According to https://www.statista.com/statistics/276623/number-of-apps-available-in-leading-app-stores/, there are almost 5 million apps worldwide for various smartphones. Apple's App Store offers approximately 1.8 million apps, Google Play offers 2.47 million, Amazon offers 600,000, and Windows offers 670,000. This number is expected to grow exponentially through 2020.

The goal of this chapter is to introduce you to the various applications seen on Android, iOS devices, and Windows Phones. Each application will vary due to versions and devices, but their underlying structures are similar. We will look at how the data is stored and why preference files are important to your investigation.

We will cover the following topics in detail in this chapter:

• Different third-party applications
• How applications are stored on iOS devices
• How applications are stored on Android devices
• Windows Phone application storage
• How to use both commercial and open source solutions to parse application data