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Android is the most popular operating system with billions of active devices. Unfortunately, its popularity and openness makes it attractive for unwanted apps, i.e., malware and potentially unwanted programs (PUP). In Android, app…

Being able to automatically detect the performance issues in apps can significantly improve apps' quality as well as having a positive influence on user satisfaction. Application Performance Management (APM) libraries are used to locate the…

Mobile apps are predominantly integrated with cloud services to benefit from enhanced functionalities. Adopting authentication using secrets such as API keys is crucial to ensure secure mobile-cloud interactions. However, developers often…

Many Android applications embed webpages via WebView components and execute JavaScript code within Android. Hybrid applications leverage dedicated APIs to load a resource and render it in a WebView. Furthermore, Android objects can be…

The rise of mobile apps has brought greater convenience and many options for users. However, many apps use analytics services to collect a wide range of user interaction data, with privacy policies often failing to reveal the types of…

Ad-load balancing is a critical challenge in online advertising systems, particularly in the context of social media platforms, where the goal is to maximize user engagement and revenue while maintaining a satisfactory user experience. This…

Modern software systems are increasingly dependent on third-party libraries. It is widely recognized that using mature and well-tested third-party libraries can improve developers' productivity, reduce time-to-market, and produce more…

Contemporary mobile applications (apps) are designed to track, use, and share users' data, often without their consent, which results in potential privacy and transparency issues. To investigate whether mobile apps have always been…

Using libraries in applications has helped developers reduce the costs of reinventing already existing code. However, an increase in diverse technology stacks and third-party library usage has led developers to inevitably switch…

Machine Learning software systems are frequently used in our day-to-day lives. Some of these systems are used in various sensitive environments to make life-changing decisions. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure that these AI/ML systems do…

Mobile applications (hereafter, apps) collect a plethora of information regarding the user behavior and his device through third-party analytics libraries. However, the collection and usage of such data raised several privacy concerns,…

There are over one million apps on Google Play Store and over half a million publishers. Having such a huge number of apps and developers can pose a challenge to app users and new publishers on the store. Discovering apps can be challenging…

In the appstore-centric ecosystem, app developers have an urgent requirement to optimize their release strategy to maximize the success opportunity of their apps. To address this problem, we introduce an approach to assisting developers to…

Software libraries are the elementary building blocks of open source software ecosystems, extending the capabilities of programming languages beyond their standard libraries. Although ecosystem health is often quantified using data on…

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…

Access to privacy-sensitive information on Android is a growing concern in the mobile community. Albeit Google Play recently introduced some privacy guidelines, it is still an open problem to soundly verify whether apps actually comply with…

In Android apps, their developers frequently place app promotion ads, namely advertisements to promote other apps. Unfortunately, the inadequate vetting of ad content allows malicious developers to exploit app promotion ads as a new…

The Android framework provides a rich set of APIs that can be exploited by developers to build their apps. However, the rapid evolution of these APIs jointly with the specific characteristics of the lifecycle of the Android components…

Third-party security apps are an integral part of the Android app ecosystem. Many users install them as an extra layer of protection for their devices. There are hundreds of such security apps, both free and paid in Google Play Store and…

Coding agents are becoming increasingly capable of completing end-to-end software engineering workflows that previously required a human developer, including raising pull requests (PRs) to propose their changes. However, we still know…