API change and fault proneness: a threat to the success of Android apps

  • Authors:

  • Mario Linares-Vásquez;Gabriele Bavota;Carlos Bernal-Cárdenas;Massimiliano Di Penta;Rocco Oliveto;Denys Poshyvanyk

  • Affiliations:

  • College of William and Mary, USA;University of Sannio, Italy;Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Colombia;University of Sannio, Italy;University of Molise, Italy;College of William and Mary, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2013 9th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

During the recent years, the market of mobile software applications (apps) has maintained an impressive upward trajectory. Many small and large software development companies invest considerable resources to target available opportunities. As of today, the markets for such devices feature over 850K+ apps for Android and 900K+ for iOS. Availability, cost, functionality, and usability are just some factors that determine the success or lack of success for a given app. Among the other factors, reliability is an important criteria: users easily get frustrated by repeated failures, crashes, and other bugs; hence, abandoning some apps in favor of others. This paper reports a study analyzing how the fault- and change-proneness of APIs used by 7,097 (free) Android apps relates to applications' lack of success, estimated from user ratings. Results of this study provide important insights into a crucial issue: making heavy use of fault- and change-prone APIs can negatively impact the success of these apps.