CI/CD Configuration Practices in Open-Source Android Apps: An Empirical Study

TL;DR

This empirical study analyzes CI/CD practices in 2,557 open-source Android apps, revealing challenges in standardization, maintenance efforts, and the focus on build and testing configurations, highlighting the need for automation and AI tools.

Contribution

The paper provides the first large-scale empirical analysis of CI/CD configurations in Android apps, identifying common challenges and maintenance patterns specific to mobile app development.

Findings

Lack of standardization across CI/CD services and Android apps.

Most configurations focus on build setup, with limited deployment.

Frequent maintenance activities linked to project activity and community engagement.

Abstract

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) is a well-established practice that automatically builds, tests, packages, and deploys software systems. To adopt CI/CD, software developers need to configure their projects using dedicated YML configuration files. Mobile apps have distinct characteristics with respect to CI/CD practices, such as testing on various emulators and deploying to app stores. However, little is known about the challenges and added value of adopting CI/CD in mobile apps and how developers maintain such a practice. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study on CI/CD practices in 2,557 Android apps adopting four popular CI/CD services, namely GitHub Actions, Travis CI, CircleCI, and GitLab CI/CD. We also compare our findings with those reported in prior research on general CI/CD practices to situate them within broader trends. We observe a lack of commonality and standardization across CI/CD services and Android apps, leading to complex YML configurations and associated maintenance efforts. We also observe that CI/CD configurations focus primarily on the build setup, with around half of the projects performing standard testing and only 9% incorporating deployment. In addition, we find that CI/CD configurations are changed bi-monthly on average, with frequent maintenance correlating with active issue tracking, project size/age, and community engagement. Our qualitative analysis of commits uncovered 11 themes in CI/CD maintenance activities, with over a third of the changes focusing on improving workflows and fixing build issues, whereas another third involves updating the build environment, tools, and dependencies. Our study emphasizes the necessity for automation and AI-powered tools to improve CI/CD processes for mobile apps and advocates creating adaptable open-source tools to efficiently manage resources, especially in testing and deployment.