On the Identification of Third-Party Library Usage Patterns for Android Applications
Richardson Alexandre, Ali Ouni, Mohamed Aymen Saied, Salah Bouktif, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer · 2022
The rapid growth of mobile applications development and usage raises several new challenges to developers as they need to respond quickly to the users’ needs in a world of continuous changes. Developers often use third-party libraries to add functionality, which significantly improves developers productivity, and reduces time-to-market. In this paper, we present an approach for the visualization and recommendation of libraries for Android apps. Our approach, named LibScanDroid, is based on how libraries are used within existing Android applications. LibScanDroid groups together libraries based on their history of joint and separate usage in existing Android applications available in Google Play Store. The library groups, i.e., usage patterns, are presented in several layers to visualize and navigate through the patterns. These groupings are performed using the ϵ-DBSCAN hierarchical clustering algorithm.We implement our approach in the form of an interactive tool and evaluate it on a database that covers 1,458 libraries that are used by over 1,000 Android applications. Our experiments have shown that our approach can detect library patterns with high co-usage cohesion. The results from the cross-validation, allows us to affirm the generalizability of the detected patterns.