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With over 500,000 commits and more than 700 contributors, the Android platform is undoubtedly one of the largest industrial-scale software projects. This project provides the Android API, and developers heavily rely on this API to develop…
Application Programming Interface (API) incompatibility is a long-standing issue in Android application development. The rapid evolution of Android APIs results in a significant number of API additions, removals, and changes between…
The Android Open Source Project (AOSP) is probably the most used and customized operating system for smartphones and IoT devices worldwide. Its market share and high adaptability makes Android an interesting operating system for many…
Current legal frameworks enforce that Android developers accurately report the data their apps collect. However, large codebases can make this reporting challenging. This paper employs an empirical approach to understand developers'…
Software libraries are central to the functionality, security, and maintainability of modern code. As developers increasingly turn to Large Language Models (LLMs) to assist with programming tasks, understanding how these models recommend…
Large software organizations such as Facebook or Netflix, who otherwise make daily or even hourly releases of their web applications using continuous delivery, have had to invest heavily into a customized release strategy for their mobile…
Software vulnerabilities have a large negative impact on the software systems that we depend on daily. Reports on software vulnerabilities always paint a grim picture, with some reports showing that 83% of organizations depend on vulnerable…
Kotlin is a novel language that represents an alternative to Java, and has been recently adopted as a first-class programming language for Android applications. Kotlin is achieving a significant diffusion among developers, and several…
Android is the most popular mobile operating system in the world, running on more than 70% of mobile devices. This implies a gigantic and very competitive market for Android apps. Being successful in such a market is far from trivial and…
[Background] Web communication is universal in cyberspace, and security risks in this domain are devastating. [Aims] We analyzed the prevalence of six security smells in mobile app servers, and we investigated the consequence of these…
The Android ecosystem faces a notable challenge known as fragmentation, which denotes the extensive diversity within the system. This issue is mainly related to differences in system versions, device hardware specifications, and…
As part of the process of resolving issues submitted by users via bug reports, Android developers attempt to reproduce and observe the failures described by the bug report. Due to the low-quality of bug reports and the complexity of modern…
Quantum computers threaten widely deployed cryptographic primitives such as RSA, DSA, and ECC. While NIST has released post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) standards (e.g., Kyber, Dilithium), mobile app ecosystems remain largely unprepared for…
Cryptojacking applications pose a serious threat to mobile devices. Due to the extensive computations, they deplete the battery fast and can even damage the device. In this work we make a step towards combating this threat. We collected and…
While mobile app evolution has been widely studied, geographical variation in app behavior remains largely unexplored. This paper presents a large-scale study of location-based Android app differentiation, uncovering two important and…
The Android platform introduces the runtime permission model in version 6.0. The new model greatly improves data privacy and user experience, but brings new challenges for app developers. First, it allows users to freely revoke granted…
A Webview embeds a full-fledged browser in a mobile application and allows the application to expose a custom interface to JavaScript code. This is a popular technique to build so-called hybrid applications, but it circumvents the usual…
Advancing our understanding of software vulnerabilities, automating their identification, the analysis of their impact, and ultimately their mitigation is necessary to enable the development of software that is more secure. While operating…
The Android unrestricted application market, being of open source nature, has made it a popular platform for third-party applications reaching millions of smart devices in the world. This tremendous increase in applications with an…
Numerous tools rely on automatic categorization of Android apps as part of their methodology. However, incorrect categorization can lead to inaccurate outcomes, such as a malware detector wrongly flagging a benign app as malicious. One such…