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A multi-dimensional study on the state of the practice of REST APIs usage in Android apps

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Abstract

REST APIs are gaining a tremendous attraction in industry and a growing usage in mobile platforms. They are well suited for providing content to apps running on small devices, like smartphones and tablets. Several research works studied REST APIs development practices for mobile apps. However, little is known about how Android apps use/consume these APIs in practice. Consequently, we propose a multi-dimensional study on the state of the practice of REST APIs usage in Android apps. We follow three directions: analysing of Android apps, mining Stack Overflow posts on REST APIs usage in Android apps, and surveying Android developers about their usage of REST APIs in their mobile apps. We (1) build a catalog of Android REST mobile clients practices, (2) propose an automatic approach to detect these practices, (3) analyze 1595 Android apps downloaded from the Google Play store, (4) mine 12,478 Stack Overflow posts to study REST APIs usage in Android apps, and (5) conduct an online survey with 118 Android developers to understand their usage of these practices. We report that only two good practices are widely considered by Android developers when implementing their mobile apps. These practices are network connectivity awareness and JSON versus XML response parsing. We also report Android developers’ recommendations for the use of third-party HTTP libraries and their role in implementing the recommended practices.

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Notes

  1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/330695/number-of-smartphone-users-worldwide/.

  2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/276623/number-of-apps-available-in-leading-app-stores/.

  3. http://git.sofa.uqam.ca/mabdellatif/PIRAC/tree/master.

  4. https://android-arsenal.com/.

  5. https://mvnrepository.com/open-source/http-clients.

  6. ,https://github.com/rtighilt/PIRAC-Android-Dataset/blob/master/REST-Client-Validation-apps.csv.

  7. http://www.ptidej.net/downloads/replications/ause20/.

  8. https://androzoo.uni.lu/.

  9. https://github.com/rtighilt/PIRAC-Android-Dataset/blob/master/pirac-analysed-dataset.csv.

  10. http://www.ptidej.net/downloads/replications/ause20/.

  11. https://bit.ly/2ypkEl9.

  12. https://forms.gle/gQhBeFdNQXERf5wc8.

  13. http://www.ptidej.net/downloads/replications/ause20/.

  14. https://developer.android.com/topic/performance/power/network/action-any-traffic.html.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université du Québec à Montréal, Montreal, Québec, Canada

    Manel Abdellatif, Rafik Tighilt, Abdelkarim Belkhir, Naouel Moha & Éric Beaudry

  2. Polytechnique Montréal, Montreal, Québec, Canada

    Manel Abdellatif

  3. Concordia University, Montreal, Québec, Canada

    Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc

Authors
  1. Manel Abdellatif
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  2. Rafik Tighilt
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  3. Abdelkarim Belkhir
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  4. Naouel Moha
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  5. Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc
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  6. Éric Beaudry
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Correspondence to Manel Abdellatif.

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Appendix: Overview of the survey questions

Appendix: Overview of the survey questions

See Table 2.

Table 2 Overview of the survey questions
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Abdellatif, M., Tighilt, R., Belkhir, A. et al. A multi-dimensional study on the state of the practice of REST APIs usage in Android apps. Autom Softw Eng 27, 187–228 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10515-020-00272-9

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