AndroidCompass: A Dataset of Android Compatibility Checks in Code Repositories

TL;DR

AndroidCompass is a dataset capturing over 80,000 changes in compatibility checks across nearly 1,400 Android apps, aiding research on handling Android version and device incompatibilities.

Contribution

The paper introduces AndroidCompass, a large dataset of compatibility check modifications, enabling analysis of how developers address Android API and device variations.

Findings

Dataset includes 80,324 compatibility check changes

Analyzed 1,394 apps from the F-Droid catalog

Provides insights into developer workaround strategies

Abstract

Many developers and organizations implement apps for Android, the most widely used operating system for mobile devices. Common problems developers face are the various hardware devices, customized Android variants, and frequent updates, forcing them to implement workarounds for the different versions and variants of Android APIs used in practice. In this paper, we contribute the Android Compatibility checkS dataSet (AndroidCompass) that comprises changes to compatibility checks developers use to enforce workarounds for specific Android versions in their apps. We extracted 80,324 changes to compatibility checks from 1,394 apps by analyzing the version histories of 2,399 projects from the F-Droid catalog. With AndroidCompass, we aim to provide data on when and how developers introduced or evolved workarounds to handle Android incompatibilities. We hope that AndroidCompass fosters research to deal with version incompatibilities, address potential design flaws, identify security concerns, and help derive solutions for other developers, among others-helping researchers to develop and evaluate novel techniques, and Android app as well as operating-system developers in engineering their software.