Understanding and detecting evolution-induced compatibility issues in Android apps

He, Dongjie; Li, Lian; Wang, Lei; Zheng, Hengjie; Li, Guangwei; Xue, Jingling

doi:10.1145/3238147.3238185

Cited by 67 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Analysis Module. This module identifies API-usages that require migration in the target app and is built on top of IctApiFinder [8]. It computes the versions on which each statement can execute using Soot [11] and Doop [22].…”

Section: Tool Descriptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Considering that methods in newer versions of the API are routinely deprecated, eliminated, added, and changed, Android developers must regularly migrate their apps to the newer API to take advantage of new functionality and ensure that their apps behave as expected on the new API. Additionally, due to the extensive fragmentation of the Android ecosystem [8,14], developers must also perform backward-compatible migrations, so that their apps can adequately function also on older APIs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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APIMigrator

Fazzini

Orso

2020

Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 7th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems

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To provide their functionality, mobile apps interact extensively with the application programming interface (API) of the underlying operating system. Given that this API evolves frequently, app developers are periodically required to migrate API usages in their apps to ensure that the apps behave as expected when running on the new API. To help developers with this tedious, error-prone, and time-consuming task, we defined a technique for automated API migration and implemented it in a tool called APIMigrator that supports Android apps. APIMigrator (1) automatically migrates API usages within an app by leveraging how developers of other apps migrated corresponding API usages and (2) validates the migrations through differential testing. We evaluated APIMigrator on a benchmark of 15 real-world apps and obtained promising results. Overall, our tool was able to migrate 85% of the API usages considered and validate 68% of these migrations. We provide a demo video of the tool at https://youtu.be/v0VfpKi_IDc. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering → Software evolution.

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Section: Tool Descriptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

APIMigrator

Fazzini

Orso

2020

Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 7th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems

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“…In recent years, each release of Android has seen the deprecation of some APIs and the introduction of new ones. Due to the fragmentation of the Android market [12], [16], app developers must update their apps to use the new APIs, while maintaining backward compatibility. Unfortunately, updating API uses is not always trivial.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automated Deprecated-API Usage Update for Android Apps: How Far are We?

Thung

Haryono

Serrano

et al. 2020

2020 IEEE 27th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)

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“…Apps are generally forward-compatible, though developers also have their role to ensure their apps will not stop on an Android new release, they must ensure forward compatibility by testing their apps against newer Androids. According to He et al [20], most apps (91.84%) have also to address compatibility issues. Furthermore, According to Yuan et al [31], apps being forward compatible to most recent and stable Android versions is one of the major influences for apps to have high user rates.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are apps ready for new Android releases?

Guilardi

Nicacio

Petrillo

2020

Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 7th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems

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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.

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Understanding and detecting evolution-induced compatibility issues in Android apps

Cited by 67 publications

References 29 publications

APIMigrator

APIMigrator

Automated Deprecated-API Usage Update for Android Apps: How Far are We?

Are apps ready for new Android releases?

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