An Empirical Analysis of Bug Reports and Bug Fixing in Open Source Android Apps

Abstract

Abstract-Smartphone platforms and applications (apps) have gained tremendous popularity recently. Due to the novelty of the smartphone platform and tools, and the low barrier to entry for app distribution, apps are prone to errors, which affects user experience and requires frequent bug fixes. An essential step towards correcting this situation is understanding the nature of the bugs and bug-fixing processes associated with smartphone platforms and apps. However, prior empirical bug studies have focused mostly on desktop and server applications. Therefore, in this paper, we perform an in-depth empirical study on bugs in the Google Android smartphone platform and 24 widely-used open-source Android apps from diverse categories such as communication, tools, and media. Our analysis has three main thrusts. First, we define several metrics to understand the quality of bug reports and analyze the bugfix process, including developer involvement. Second, we show how differences in bug life-cycles can affect the bug-fix process. Third, as Android devices carry significant amounts of securitysensitive information, we perform a study of Android security bugs. We found that, although contributor activity in these projects is generally high, developer involvement decreases in some projects; similarly, while bug-report quality is high, bug triaging is still a problem. Finally, we observe that in Android apps, security bug reports are of higher quality but get fixed slower than non-security bugs. We believe that the findings of our study could potentially benefit both developers and users of Android apps.

Analyzing confidentiality and privacy concerns

“…As noted in Section 1, with security being seen as central to user perceptions of software quality [4], leading in part to growing interest in the security of mobile OSs [12,14], it would seem timely to explore and provide understandings for the nature of Android security-related issues, how stakeholders' views covary, and various users' preferences and priorities with respect to changes. Such insights would provide indirect understandings around the attention that is given to such issues by the community.…”

“…For instance, Zaman et al [4] compared developers' focus on security and performance bugs in Firefox and found that security bugs were favored for fixing over those that were performance-related, and were fixed much more quickly. Critical security bugs have also been removed from the Android issue list to avoid or reduce exacerbation or exploitation of such issues [12].…”

Auto-completing bug reports for Android applications

“…al. [24] concluded that most Android bug reports for open source apps are of high-quality, however in their study only ≈ 46% of bug report contained steps to reproduce, and even fewer (≈ 20%) contained additional information (e.g. bug-triggering input or even an app version).…”

Exploring the Prevalence and Evolution of Android Concerns: A Community Viewpoint

“…Furthermore, Android's very rapid evolution has not been replicated by other mobile OS projects [28], and so, this may affect the generalizability of our findings. That said, the classification scheme used for studying NFRs issues is applicable to all software projects [64]. Furthermore, although the issue tracker of many mobile OSs are not publicly available, and the distribution of these OS issues may not be similar to what is observed in this work for Android OS, mobile OS like Microsoft Windows, Apple iOS, Symbian and BlackBerry are all likely to follow release-maintenance cycles similar to that of Android OS in order to improve their offerings.…”