Software Analytics for Mobile Applications - Insights & Lessons Learned

Mobile applications, known as apps, are software systems running on handheld devices, such as smartphones and tablet PCs. The market of apps has rapidly expanded in the past few years into a multi-billion dollar business. Being a new phenomenon, it is unclear whether approaches to maintain and comprehend traditional software systems can be ported to the context of apps. We present a novel approach to comprehend apps from a structural and historical perspective, leveraging three factors for the analysis: source code, usage of third-party APIs, and historical data. We implemented our approach in a web-based software analytics platform named SAMOA. We detail our approach and the supporting tool, and present a number of findings obtained while investigating a corpus of mobile applications. Our findings reveal that apps differ significantly from traditional software systems in a number of ways, which calls for the development of novel approaches to maintain and comprehend them.