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Third-party libraries in mobile apps

When, how, and why developers update them

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Abstract

When developing new software, third-party libraries are commonly used to reduce implementation efforts. However, even these libraries undergo evolution activities to offer new functionalities and fix bugs or security issues. The research community has mainly investigated third-party libraries in the context of desktop applications, while only little is known regarding the mobile context. In this paper, we bridge this gap by investigating when, how, and why mobile developers update third-party libraries. By mining 2752 mobile apps, we study (i) whether mobile developers update third-party libraries, (ii) how much such apps lag behind the latest version of their dependencies, (iii) which are the categories of libraries that are more prone to be updated, and (iv) what are the common patterns followed by developers when updating a library. Then, we perform a survey with 73 mobile developers that aims at shedding lights on the reasons why they update (or not) third-party libraries. We find that mobile developers rarely update libraries, and when they do, they mainly tend to update libraries related to the Graphical User Interface. Avoiding bug propagation and making the app compatible with new Android releases are the top reasons why developers update their libraries.

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Notes

  1. In this paper we refer to version change to indicate every type of change performed by developers of a mobile app in the usage of a third-party library, i.e., a version change can be an upgrade toward a newer version of a library or downgrade toward a lower one.

  2. https://f-droid.org

  3. https://www.optimizely.com/statistics/

  4. https://www.google.us/intl/en/forms/about/

  5. https://neo4j.com

  6. https://github.com/owncloud/android/pull/1070

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Associate Editor and anonymous reviewers for the constructive feedback that has been instrumental to improve the quality of our work. Fabio Palomba gratefully acknowledges the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation through the SNF Project No. PP00P2_170529. Dario Di Nucci is partially supported by the Excellence of Science Project SECO-Assist (O015718F, FWO-Vlaanderen and F.R.S.-FNRS).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Pasquale Salza & Fabio Palomba

  2. Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium

    Dario Di Nucci

  3. University of Salerno, Fisciano, Italy

    Andrea De Lucia & Filomena Ferrucci

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  1. Pasquale Salza
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  2. Fabio Palomba
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  3. Dario Di Nucci
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  4. Andrea De Lucia
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Correspondence to Pasquale Salza.

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Communicated by: Chanchal Roy, Janet Siegmund, and David Lo

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Salza, P., Palomba, F., Di Nucci, D. et al. Third-party libraries in mobile apps. Empir Software Eng 25, 2341–2377 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-019-09754-1

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