Understanding Reuse in the Android Market
Authors -
Israel, J. Mojica Ruiz;
Meiyappan, Nagappan;
Bram, Adams and
Ahmed, E. Hassan
Venue -
In Proceedings of the 20th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC 2012), Passau, Germany, June 11-13, 2012
Related Tags -
Abstract -
Mobile apps are software products developed to run
on mobile devices, and are typically distributed via app stores.
The mobile app market is estimated to be worth billions of
dollars, with more than hundred of thousands of apps, and
still increasing in number. This explosion of mobile apps is
astonishing, given the short time span that they have been around.
One possible explanation for this explosion could be the practice
of software reuse. Yet, no research has studied such practice in
mobile app development. In this paper, we intend to analyze
software reuse in the Android mobile app market along two
dimensions: (a) reuse by inheritance, and (b) class reuse. Since
app stores only distribute the byte code of the mobile apps, and
not the source code, we used the concept of Software Bertillonage
to track code across mobile apps. A case study on thousands
of mobile apps across five different categories in the Android
Market shows that almost 23% of the classes inherit from a base
class in the Android API, and 27% of the classes inherit from
a domain specific base class. Furthermore, on average 61% of
all classes in each category of mobile apps occur in two or more
apps, and 217 mobile apps are reused completely by another
mobile app in the same category.
Preprint -
PDF
BibTex -
@article{Ruiz2012_4,
author = {Israel, J. Mojica Ruiz and Meiyappan, Nagappan and Bram, Adams and Ahmed, E. Hassan},
keyword = {Mobile Apps, ESE in Ultra Large Repositories},
title = {Understanding Reuse in the Android Market},
type = {conference},
venue = {In Proceedings of the 20th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC 2012), Passau, Germany, June 11-13, 2012}
}