Target Fragmentation in Android Apps

Mutchler, Patrick; Safaei, Yeganeh; Doupé, Adam; Mitchell, John C.

doi:10.1109/spw.2016.31

Cited by 36 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Hora et al have also investigated how developers react to API evolution for the Pharo system [37]. These findings show that API evolution can have a large impact on a 10 Particularly, in regions such as China where there is no hegemony of a single market. software ecosystem in terms of client systems, methods, and developers.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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CiD: automating the detection of API-related compatibility issues in Android apps

Bissyandé

Wang

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 27th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

116

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The Android Application Programming Interface provides the necessary building blocks for app developers to harness the functionalities of the Android devices, including for interacting with services and accessing hardware. This API thus evolves rapidly to meet new requirements for security, performance and advanced features, creating a race for developers to update apps. Unfortunately, given the extent of the API and the lack of automated alerts on important changes, Android apps are suffered from API-related compatibility issues. These issues can manifest themselves as runtime crashes creating a poor user experience. We propose in this paper an automated approach named CiD for systematically modelling the lifecycle of the Android APIs and analysing app bytecode to flag usages that can lead to potential compatibility issues. We demonstrate the usefulness of CiD by helping developers repair their apps, and we validate that our tool outperforms the state-of-the-art on benchmark apps that take into account several challenges for automatic detection.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A few works in the literature have investigated API compatibility issues [9][10][11][12]. Most recently, Wei et al have focused on fragmentation-induced compatibility issues [9].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

CiD: automating the detection of API-related compatibility issues in Android apps

Bissyandé

Wang

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 27th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

116

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For this reason, we had to find another mechanism for categorizing our data. We could not use the targetSdkVersion contained in the AndroidManifest.xml, because 93% of the current apps target out‐of‐date platform versions . To outline the time window in which the app has been firstly developed, we argue that the minSdkVersion contained in the AndroidManifest.xml constitutes a good indicator, since developers are recommended (1) to consult the Dashboard for Platform Versions and (2) to support about 90% of the active devices, when deciding on a minSdkVersion .…”

Section: Threats To Validitymentioning

confidence: 99%

An exploratory study on the evolution of Android malware quality

Mercaldo

Sorbo

Visaggio

et al. 2018

J Software Evolu Process

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In the context of software engineering, product software quality measures how well a software artifact is designed and coded. Software products must satisfy nonfunctional properties (eg, reliability, usability, understandability, and maintainability), in order to make maintenance and evolution sustainable in the long period. Software evolution is an issue of interest for the malware writers, too, for 2 reasons. First, to evade detection with the minimum effort, malware writers use to produce “variants,” which are obtained by applying little changes to existing malware. Morevoer, recent studies demonstrated that malware is increasingly improving evasion strategies and infection mechanisms and is using more and more complex payloads. This suggests that malware writers are devoting relevant efforts and skills for producing high‐quality software. For this reason, we wonder whether malware writers are devoting effort to improve the structural quality of their code, too, as it happens in the development of goodware. To investigate this question, we (1) characterize a dataset containing about 20 000 Android applications, divided into goodware and malware ones, relying on the Android API version they require, and (2) compute software quality metrics, divided into 4 categories (ie, dimensional, complexity, object‐oriented, and Android‐oriented metrics) for apps belonging to each population. We then identify evolution trends of these metrics in malware and goodware. The results of our study demonstrate that goodware and malicious applications exhibit similar evolution trends for some of the quality indicators, suggesting that malware writers care about the overall quality of their code. Code quality could be considered an indirect measure of how many and how fast variants of existing malware will be released in the wild.

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“…In fact, one of the latest reports found focusing on the fragmented Android smartphone market is one by OpenSignal from 2015, in which they identify more than 24000 distinct Android-based devices [71] from a pool of 682000 devices having downloaded their app. Not only must developers deal with device fragmentation, also the version fragmentation is challenging according to the Android Developer platform [6] Android market, Mutchler et al [70] uncover that version compatibility of apps, i.e. running apps targeting older SDKs on a new device, can in fact compromise certain security features added in later versions.…”

Section: :25mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Survey and Taxonomy of Core Concepts and Research Challenges in Cross-Platform Mobile Development

2018

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Developing applications targeting mobile devices is a complex task involving numerous options, technologies and trade-o s, much so due to the proliferation and fragmentation of devices and platforms. As a result of this, cross-platform app development has enjoyed the attention of practitioners and academia for the previous decade. Throughout this review, we assess the academic body of knowledge and report on the state of research on the eld. We do so with a particular emphasis on core concepts, including those of user experience, device features, performance, and security. Our ndings illustrate that the state of research demand for empirical veri cation of an array of unbacked claims, and that a particular focus on qualitative user-oriented research is essential. Through our outlined taxonomy and state of research overview, we identify research gaps and challenges, and provide numerous suggestions for further research.

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Target Fragmentation in Android Apps

Cited by 36 publications

References 16 publications

CiD: automating the detection of API-related compatibility issues in Android apps

CiD: automating the detection of API-related compatibility issues in Android apps

An exploratory study on the evolution of Android malware quality

A Survey and Taxonomy of Core Concepts and Research Challenges in Cross-Platform Mobile Development

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