Collect, Decompile, Extract, Stats, and Diff
Khalid Alharbi, Tom Yeh · 2015
Mobile user interface design patterns have been widely used across different mobile platforms. UI design patterns have evolved and changed significantly as new trends emerge and fade at different times. This paper presents a data-mining approach to analyzing design pattern changes in Android apps. Over a period of 18 months, we tracked 24,436 apps and collected their versions. In total, our sample consists of 56,349 unique app versions, more than 5 million source files, and more than 25 million UI elements. We developed a dedicated infrastructure based on modern big data technologies to support our differential analyses regarding design pattern changes. Some highlights of our findings include a) some apps would switch to a design pattern even after it was deprecated, b) the adoption rate of newly introduced design patterns (e.g., Fragment) is relatively low, c) some apps would update their listing details to reflect changes in design patterns.