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CDA: Characterising Deprecated Android APIs

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Abstract

Because of functionality evolution, or security and performance-related changes, some APIs eventually become unnecessary in a software system and thus need to be cleaned to ensure proper maintainability. Those APIs are typically marked first as deprecated APIs and, as recommended, follow through a deprecated-replace-remove cycle, giving an opportunity to client application developers to smoothly adapt their code in next updates. Such a mechanism is adopted in the Android framework development where thousands of reusable APIs are made available to Android app developers. In this work, we present a research-based prototype tool called CDA and apply it to different revisions (i.e., releases or tags) of the Android framework code for characterising deprecated APIs. Based on the data mined by CDA, we then perform an empirical study on API deprecation in the Android ecosystem and the associated challenges for maintaining quality apps. In particular, we investigate the prevalence of deprecated APIs, their annotations and documentation, their removal and consequences, their replacement messages, developer reactions to API deprecation, as well as the evolution of the usage of deprecated APIs. Experimental results reveal several findings that further provide promising insights related to deprecated Android APIs. Notably, by mining the source code of the Android framework base, we have identified three bugs related to deprecated APIs. These bugs have been quickly assigned and positively appreciated by the framework maintainers, who claim that these issues will be updated in future releases.

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Notes

  1. https://issuetracker.google.com

  2. The issue IDs of the submitted bugs are 69105065, 69104762 and 69098890.

  3. The online web service can be accessed via http://35.224.210.36/DAU/

  4. https://developer.android.com/index.html

  5. https://github.com/android/platform_frameworks_base

  6. commit: 54b6cfa9a9e5b861a9930af873580d6dc20f773c

  7. https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base.git

  8. There are no releases (or tags) for API levels 1-3, 11 and 12 while the API level 20 is reserved for wearable devices.

  9. We hypothesise that these apps may be handled differently w.r.t. deprecated APIs compared to GPlay ones.

  10. The full list of involved third-party markets includes AppChina, Anzhi, MI.com, 1Mobile, Angeeks, Slideme, F-Droid, Praguard, Torrents, Freewarelovers, Proandroid, Hiapk, Genome, APK_Bang.

  11. By using gshuf — head -5000 command.

  12. As footnoted before, the issue IDs of the submitted bugs are 69105065, 69104762 and 69098890, where the status of these issues so far are Fixed, Assigned and Assigned, respectively.

  13. The actual time can be computed based on the released time of selected tags (e.g., android-7.0.0_r7 is released on 2016-08-23 while android-6.0.1_r9 is released on 2015-12-15).

  14. Following the rules illustrated in Section 3.2.

  15. Comment Message: This method is only used by a few internal components and it will soon be replaced by a proper bug report API (which will be restricted to a few, pre-defined apps).

  16. In this experiment, only the APIs that are explicitly deprecated at the method level are considered. When deprecating APIs at the class level, i.e., deprecating classes, it will unlikely to provide replacement messages to their methods.

  17. Declared class name, method name, and arguments.

  18. We have appended zero to third-party markets (i.e., NGPlay) to balance the number of elements.

  19. Given a significance level α = 0.001, if p-value < α, there is one chance in a thousand that the difference between the datasets is due to a coincidence.

  20. In this work, we consider the common libraries revealed by Li et al. (2016a) as the white-list to flag whether a caller belongs to libraries. This white-list contains over 1,000 common libraries mined from over 1.5 million Android apps.

  21. https://github.com/anggrayudi/android-hidden-api

  22. https://developer.android.com/about/versions/pie/restrictions-non-sdk-interfaces

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers who have provided insightful and constructive comments to the conference version of this extension. This work was supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC), under projects DE200100016 and DP200100020, and by the Oceania Cyber Security Centre (OCSC), under the 2019 ICFP scheme.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Clayton, Australia

    Li Li & Xin Xia

  2. Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust, University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg

    Jun Gao, Tegawendé F. Bissyandé & Jacques Klein

  3. Faculty of Information Science and Electrical Engineering, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan

    Lei Ma

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  1. Li Li
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  2. Jun Gao
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  3. Tegawendé F. Bissyandé
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  4. Lei Ma
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  5. Xin Xia
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  6. Jacques Klein
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Correspondence to Li Li.

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Communicated by: Georgios Gousios, Yasutaka Kamei, Sarah Nadi, and Andy Zaidman

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Li, L., Gao, J., Bissyandé, T.F. et al. CDA: Characterising Deprecated Android APIs. Empir Software Eng 25, 2058–2098 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-019-09764-z

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