Revisiting prior empirical findings for mobile apps: an empirical case study on the 15 most popular open-source Android apps

Our increasing reliance on mobile devices has led to the explosive development of millions of mobile apps across multiple platforms that are used by millions of people around the world every day. However, most software engineering research is performed on large desktop or server-side software applications (e.g., Eclipse and Apache). Unlike the software applications that we typically study, mobile apps are 1) designed to run on devices with limited, but diverse, resources (e.g., limited screen space and touch interfaces with diverse gestures) and 2) distributed through centralized "app stores," where there is a low barrier to entry and heavy competition. Hence, mobile apps may differ from traditionally studied desktop or server side applications, the extent that existing software development "best practices" may not apply to mobile apps. Therefore, we perform an exploratory study, comparing mobile apps to commonly studied large applications and smaller applications along two dimensions: the size of the code base and the time to fix defects. Finally, we discuss the impact of our findings by identifying a set of unique software engineering challenges posed by mobile apps.