MSR 2024
Mon 15 - Tue 16 April 2024 Lisbon, Portugal
co-located with ICSE 2024
Mon 15 Apr 2024 16:36 - 16:48 at Almada Negreiros - Mobile Apps Chair(s): Dario Di Nucci

For years, researchers have been analyzing mobile Android apps to investigate diverse properties such as software engineering practices, business models, security, privacy, or usability, as well as differences between marketplaces. While similar studies on iOS have been limited, recent work has started to analyze and compare Android apps with those for iOS. To obtain the most representative analysis results across platforms, the ideal approach is to compare their characteristics and behavior for the same set of apps, e. g., to study a set of apps for iOS and their respective counterparts for Android. Previous work has only attempted to identify and evaluate such cross-platform apps to a limited degree, mostly comparing sets of apps independently drawn from app stores, manually matching small sets of apps, or relying on brittle matches based on app and developer names. This results in (1) comparing apps whose behavior and properties significantly differ, (2) limited scalability, and (3) the risk of matching only a small fraction of apps.

In this work, we propose a novel approach to create an extensive dataset of cross-platform apps for the iOS and Android ecosystems. We describe an analysis pipeline for discovering, retrieving, and matching apps from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store that we used to create a set of 3,322 cross-platform apps out of 10,000 popular apps for iOS and Android, respectively. We evaluate existing and new approaches for cross-platform app matching against a set of reference pairs that we obtained from Google’s data migration service. We identify a combination of seven features from app store metadata and the apps themselves to match iOS and Android apps with high confidence (95.82 %). Compared to previous attempts that identified 14 % of apps as cross-platform, we are able to match 34 % of apps in our dataset. To foster future research in the cross-platform analysis of mobile apps, we make our pipeline available to the community.

Mon 15 Apr

Displayed time zone: Lisbon change

16:00 - 17:30
Mobile AppsData and Tool Showcase Track / Technical Papers at Almada Negreiros
Chair(s): Dario Di Nucci University of Salerno
16:00
12m
Talk
Automating GUI-based Test Oracles for Mobile Apps
Technical Papers
Kesina Baral CQSE America, Jack Johnson , Junayed Mahmud George Mason University, Sabiha Salma George Mason University, Mattia Fazzini University of Minnesota, Julia Rubin University of British Columbia, Jeff Offutt George Mason University, Kevin Moran University of Central Florida
16:12
12m
Talk
Global Prosperity or Local Monopoly? Understanding the Geography of App Popularity
Technical Papers
Liu Wang Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Conghui Zheng Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Haoyu Wang Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Xiapu Luo The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Gareth Tyson Queen Mary University of London, Yi Wang , Shangguang Wang Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications
16:24
12m
Talk
GuiEvo: Automated Evolution of Mobile App UIs
Technical Papers
Sabiha Salma George Mason University, S M Hasan Mansur George Mason University, Yule Zhang George Mason University, Kevin Moran University of Central Florida
16:36
12m
Talk
Comparing Apples to Androids: Discovery, Retrieval, and Matching of iOS and Android Apps for Cross-Platform Analyses
Technical Papers
Magdalena Steinböck TU Wien, Jakob Bleier TU Wien, Mikka Rainer CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Tobias Urban Institute for Internet Security & secunet Security Networks AG, Christine Utz CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Martina Lindorfer TU Wien
16:48
12m
Talk
Keep Me Updated: An Empirical Study on Embedded Javascript Engines in Android Apps
Technical Papers
Elliott Wen The University of Auckland, Jiaxiang Liu The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Xiapu Luo The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Giovanni Russello University of Auckland, Jens Dietrich Victoria University of Wellington
17:00
12m
Talk
Large Language Model vs. Stack Overflow in Addressing Android Permission Related Challenges
Technical Papers
Sahrima Jannat Oishwee University of Saskatchewan, Natalia Stakhanova University of Saskatchewan, Zadia Codabux University of Saskatchewan, Canada
17:12
4m
Talk
DATAR: A Dataset for Tracking App Releases
Data and Tool Showcase Track
Yasaman Abedini Sharif University of Technology, Mohammad Hadi Hajihosseini Sharif University of Technology, Abbas Heydarnoori Bowling Green State University
17:16
4m
Talk
AndroZoo: A Retrospective with a Glimpse into the Future
Data and Tool Showcase Track
Marco Alecci University of Luxembourg, Pedro Jesús Ruiz Jiménez University of Luxembourg, Kevin Allix Independent Researcher, Tegawendé F. Bissyandé University of Luxembourg, Jacques Klein University of Luxembourg