Empirical Study on REST APIs Usage in Android Mobile Applications

Abstract

A large set of mobile applications (apps) heavily rely on services accessible through the Web via REST APIs. The mobile apps market is therefore becoming a key market for service providers. However, the way in which mobile apps use services in practice has never been studied. In this paper, we perform an empirical study in the Android ecosystem in which we analyze 500 popular applications and 15 popular services. We also conducted an online survey to identify which are the best practices for Android developers. Our results show that Android developers generally favor invoking services by using an official service library instead of directly invoking services with a generic HTTP client.Our study shows that Android developers prefer to use a dedicated library developed by the service provider if it exists. The main advantages of such a library are that it simplifies the calls of the REST services but also provides added-value such as Android Views for example.

An Empirical Study of Web Services Topics in Web Developer Discussions on Stack Overflow

“…The majority of previous research on WSs searching and recommendation may be classified as keyword-based [19], [20], [21], [22], [23], [24], quality of services-based [25], [26], [27], [28], [29], semantics-based [30], [31], [32], [33], [34], [35], [36], [37], [38], [39], [40], and network-based [41], [42], [43], [44], [45], [46] studies according to the WSs requirement descriptive models and approaches used for assessing relationship between WSs and users' requirements. In spite of the various studies on WSs retrieval and suggestions, a number of studies [47], [48], [49], [50], [51], [52], [53], [54], [55], [56], [57], [58], [59], [60], [61], [62], [63], [64], [65]…”

“…Oumaziz et al [62] conducted empirical research to comprehend how RESTful services are utilized by Android applications by using 15 famous WSs and 500 software apps. The best practices for Android developers were determined by administrating an online survey.…”

Benchmarking Web API Quality

“…Other studies assessed web API usage outside of ProgrammableWeb, and specifically in the context of mobile applications. For example, Oumaziz et al perform static analysis on mobile applications to assess if and to what extent they interact with web APIs [22]. Rapoport et al combine static analysis with a dynamic execution of selected mobile applications, exploring how to best detect consumption of web APIs [23].…”