Web API Fragility: How Robust is Your Web API Client

TL;DR

This paper investigates the robustness of mobile applications to evolving web APIs by analyzing 48 apps' responses to mutations and interviewing developers about their handling of API changes.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of how well mobile apps cope with web API evolution and offers insights from developer interviews on their strategies.

Findings

Many apps show fragility to API response mutations

Developers often lack systematic strategies for handling API changes

API evolution impacts app stability and user experience

Abstract

Web APIs provide a systematic and extensible approach for application-to-application interaction. A large number of mobile applications makes use of web APIs to integrate services into apps. Each Web API's evolution pace is determined by their respective developer and mobile application developers are forced to accompany the API providers in their software evolution tasks. In this paper we investigate whether mobile application developers understand and how they deal with the added distress of web APIs evolving. In particular, we studied how robust 48 high profile mobile applications are when dealing with mutated web API responses. Additionally, we interviewed three mobile application developers to better understand their choices and trade-offs regarding web API integration.