Accessing Inaccessible Android APIs: An Empirical Study

LI, Li; BISSYANDE, Tegawendé François D Assise; LE TRAON, Yves; KLEIN, Jacques

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Accessing Inaccessible Android APIs: An Empirical Study

LI, Li; BISSYANDE, Tegawendé François D Assise; LE TRAON, Yves et al.

2016 • In The 32nd International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)

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https://hdl.handle.net/10993/28304

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Abstract :

[en] As Android becomes a de-facto choice of development platform for mobile apps, developers extensively leverage its accompanying Software Development Kit to quickly build their apps. This SDK comes with a set of APIs which developers may find limited in comparison to what system apps can do or what framework developers are preparing to harness capabilities of new generation devices. Thus, developers may attempt to explore in advance the normally “inaccessible” APIs for building unique API-based functionality in their app. The Android programming model is unique in its kind. Inaccessible APIs, which however are used by developers, constitute yet another specificity of Android development, and is worth investigating to understand what they are, how they evolve over time, and who uses them. To that end, in this work, we empirically investigate 17 important releases of the Android framework source code base, and we find that inaccessible APIs are commonly implemented in the Android framework, which are further neither forward nor backward compatible. Moreover, a small set of inaccessible APIs can eventually become publicly accessible, while most of them are removed during the evolution, resulting in risks for such apps that have leveraged inaccessible APIs. Finally, we show that inaccessible APIs are indeed accessed by third-party apps, and the official Google Play store has tolerated the proliferation of apps leveraging inaccessible API methods.

Research center :

SnT

Disciplines :

Computer science

Author, co-author :

LI, Li ; University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT)

BISSYANDE, Tegawendé François D Assise ; University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT)

LE TRAON, Yves ; University of Luxembourg > Faculty of Science, Technology and Communication (FSTC) > Computer Science and Communications Research Unit (CSC)

KLEIN, Jacques ; University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT) > Computer Science and Communications Research Unit (CSC)

External co-authors :

Language :

English

Title :

Accessing Inaccessible Android APIs: An Empirical Study

Publication date :

October 2016

Event name :

The 32nd International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)

Event date :

from 02-10-2016 to 10-10-2016

Audience :

International

Main work title :

The 32nd International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)

Pages :

Peer reviewed :

Peer reviewed

FnR Project :

FNR10449467 - Automatic Bug Fix Recommendation: Improving Software Repair And Reducing Time-to-fix Delays In Software Development Projects, 2015 (01/02/2016-31/01/2019) - Tegawendé François D'assise Bissyandé

Name of the research project :

AndroMap C13/IS/5921289 and Recommend C15/IS/10449467

Funders :

The Fonds National de la Recherche (FNR)

Available on ORBilu :

since 02 September 2016

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