Organising the knowledge from stack overflow about location‐sensing of Android applications

Abstract

The number of Android applications using location information has increased significantly in recent years. Over time, there have been many improvements made to the location application programme interfaces (APIs), providing newer challenges and difficulties to the developers. Therefore, there is a need to summarise the existing knowledge and to highlight the unsolved issues to bring them to the attention of expert developers. The authors used the non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF) method to identify the topics discussed by the developers on stack overflow. They found the following ten topics: fundamental, background service, global positioning system (GPS) provider, application error, location updates, programming aspects, GPS alternatives, location settings, NULL location, and location testing. In addition, they performed a manual analysis to add more qualitative insights into the results. They applied the NMF method on 3165 question posts and produced ten related topics. This study aims at organising the knowledge about location-sensing strategies by answering three relevant research questions. They also analysed the most popular and unanswered topics in recent years. An important finding of this study is that the changes that occurred in the Google Location APIs have had a significant impact on the location-sensing strategies followed by the developers.