Towards Understanding Android APIs: Official Lists, Vendor Customizations, and Real-World Usage
Sinan Wang, Qi Zhang, Jiacheng Li, Lili Wei, Yida Tao, Yepang Liu

TL;DR
This study systematically compares four official Android API lists, analyzing their evolution, inconsistencies, and impact on research, revealing significant discrepancies and vendor API usage in real-world apps.
Contribution
It provides the first comprehensive empirical analysis of official Android API lists, highlighting their instability and influence on research outcomes.
Findings
Official AALs are unstable and inconsistent across Android versions.
Vendor-customized APIs are widely used by apps but often overlooked in research.
Differences among AALs can significantly affect empirical Android studies.
Abstract
Android apps are built on APIs that abstract core Android system functionalities. These APIs are officially documented in multiple files distributed with the Android source code or SDK, which we collectively refer to as Android API Lists (AALs). Prior Android research has relied on specific AALs, often treating them as interchangeable ground truth. However, recent studies suggest that different AALs can lead to substantially different research outcomes, raising concerns about the validity and reproducibility of Android API-based analyses. To address this issue, we present the first in-depth empirical study of four official AALs that are widely used in prior work. We systematically characterize their contents and analyze their evolution across Android releases. We then perform a fine-grained comparison of the APIs recorded in each AAL to uncover their underlying API inclusion policies…
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