Unveiling the Architecture and Design of Android Applications - An Exploratory Study

Abstract

This work presents an exploratory study whose goal was to investigate the architectural characteristics of Android's applications. We selected twelve popular and open-source applications available on the official Android's store for analysing. Then, we applied techniques of the reverse engineering to each target application in order to investigate three main aspects: (i) architecture of each application; use of the (ii) design patterns; and (iii) expecting handling policies. Support tools were used in order to identify dependencies between architectural components implemented in each target application, and to graphically present those dependencies. Then, based on this analysing, we present a qualitative analysis carried out on the extracted architectures. One of the outcomes consistently detected during this study was an overview of the main architectural choices that have been adopted by Android developers, resulting on formulation of a preliminary conceptual architecture for Android applications.

Guidelines for Architecting Android Apps: A Mixed-Method Empirical Study

“…The proposed pattern has been applied to an example of social networking app in collaboration with a development company. Differently from [21], we do not aim at providing a new architectural pattern, rather we accept the existence of many pre-existing ones in Android apps (also confirmed in [19], [20]) and aim at supporting developers while architecting Android apps, without forcing them to learn and apply new (potentially unsupported) architectural patterns.…”

“…An exploratory study targeting common architectural characteristics of 12 real Android applications is reported in [20]. The study is based on the partial extraction of the architecture of the apps using the JDepend tool, followed by the manual analysis of the source code of the targeted apps.…”

“…In our work we apply a totally different research methodology, where we target professional developers working on industrial projects, rather than developers working on open-source apps. Also, the work proposed in [20] is exploratory in nature and aims at observing the characteristics of the architecture of Android apps, whereas we aim at providing actionable guidelines for helping developers during their everyday activities.…”

Quality Attributes and Architectural Patterns of Modern Mobile Apps

“…Over the years, the MVC architecture gained a lot of popularity among developers thanks to its clear separation of concerns [6].…”