TL;DR
This study investigates the adoption of Kotlin in open-source Android apps and finds that Kotlin usage is increasing, often improving app quality by reducing code smells compared to Java-only apps.
Contribution
It provides empirical evidence on Kotlin adoption rates and its positive impact on app quality, filling a gap in understanding Kotlin's real-world benefits.
Findings
11.26% of apps use Kotlin
Kotlin adoption is increasing in open-source Android apps
Kotlin usage often reduces code smells and improves quality
Abstract
Context: During the last years, developers of mobile applications have the possibility to use new paradigms and tools for developing mobile applications. For instance, since 2017 Android developers have the official support to write Android applications using Kotlin language. Kotlin is programming language fully interoperable with Java that combines object-oriented and functional features. Objective: The goal of this paper is twofold. First, it aims to study the degree of adoption of Kotlin language on development of open-source Android applications and to measure the amount of Kotlin code inside Android applications. Secondly, it aims to measure the quality of Android applications that are written using Kotlin and to compare it with the quality of Android applications written using Java. Method: We first defined a method to detect Kotlin applications from a dataset of open-source…
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