A First Look at CI/CD Adoptions in Open-Source Android Apps

TL;DR

This study explores the adoption of CI/CD practices in open-source Android apps, revealing low usage rates, limited multi-service adoption, and the positive impact of CI/CD on app popularity.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale analysis of CI/CD adoption in open-source Android apps, highlighting usage patterns and their effects on project popularity.

Findings

Only about 10% of apps use CI/CD services.

Few apps adopt multiple CI/CD services.

CI/CD adoption correlates with increased project popularity.

Abstract

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) have been demonstrated to be effective in facilitating software building, testing, and deployment. Many research studies have investigated and subsequently improved their working processes. Unfortunately, such research efforts have largely not touched on the usage of CI/CD in the development of Android apps. We fill this gap by conducting an exploratory study of CI/CD adoption in open-source Android apps. We start by collecting a set of 84,475 open-source Android apps from the most popular three online code hosting sites, namely Github, GitLab, and Bitbucket. We then look into those apps and find that (1) only around 10\% of apps have leveraged CI/CD services, i.e., the majority of open-source Android apps are developed without accessing CI/CD services, (2) a small number of apps (291) has even adopted multiple CI/CD services, (3) nearly half of the apps adopted CI/CD services have not really used them, and (4) CI/CD services are useful to improve the popularity of projects.