How Android developers handle evolution-induced API compatibility issues: a large-scale study
Abstract
As Android platform evolves in a fast pace, API-related compatibility issues become a significant challenge for developers. To handle an incompatible API invocation, developers mainly have two choices: merely performing sufficient checks to avoid invoking incompatible APIs on platforms that do not support them, or gracefully providing replacement implementations on those incompatible platforms. As providing more consistent app behaviors, the latter one is more recommended and more challenging to adopt. However, it is still unknown how these issues are handled in the real world, do developers meet difficulties and what can we do to help them.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{Xia-al:ICSE20,
author = {Hao Xia and
Yuan Zhang and
Yingtian Zhou and
Xiaoting Chen and
Yang Wang and
Xiangyu Zhang and
Shuaishuai Cui and
Geng Hong and
Xiaohan Zhang and
Min Yang and
Zhemin Yang},
title = {How Android developers handle evolution-induced {API} compatibility issues: a large-scale study},
booktitle = {ICSE},
pages = {886--898},
publisher = {{ACM}},
year = {2020},
}