Third-party libraries are widely used in mobile apps. Recent studies showed that third-party libraries account for more than 60% of the code in Android apps on average. As a result, program analysis on Android apps typically requires detecting or removing third-party libraries first, because they usually introduce significant noises and affect the analysis results. In this technical briefing, we will introduce the latest research advances related to third-party libraries used in mobile apps. The briefing will be focused on: (1) the importance of third-party libraries, including the current status, types and distribution, based on the analysis results on over 1 million Android apps; (2) how to detect third-party libraries from Android apps, including an overview of existing approaches and their limitations; (3) the implications of third-party libraries in software engineering tasks such as mobile app analysis, as well as case studies from the domain of program analysis and mobile security; (4) future challenges and research directions related to third-party libraries.
