Are apps ready for new Android releases?

Abstract

Context: Android operating system always brings new releases and updates to improve security, increase performance and bring a better user experience. When Google announces a new release, a whole chain of changes is triggered in cascade, causing many compatibility issues. Objective: This study focus at performing a quantitative and qualitative analysis on the state of apps readiness for new Android releases over time. Method: We performed an empirical study to map apps readiness to different Android versions. We developed a Repository Mining Tool to analyse 8420 opensource repositories, detecting 2118 Android projects and when they were adapted to different Android versions along their lifetimes. Results: Our results show that Android apps have became "less ready" over time. We found that 76.45% of the analysed apps were ready for Android Lollipop 5.0 (API level 21) release, in October 2014. Though only 5.46% were ready for Android 10 (API level 29), in September 2019. In addition, our results show that when apps are adapted to an Android version, 59.41% perform the adaptation until the new Android release month, 95% are adapted twelve months after the release, and 99.16% are adapted two years later. Conclusion: Our findings reveal implications that affect not only the Android or mobile development research field and developers, they also reveal implications that points to Google's policies and Android final users as well.