The Impact of API Change- And Fault-Proneness on the User Ratings of Android Apps

ABSTRACT

The mobile apps market is one of the fastest growing areas in the information technology. In digging their market share, developers must pay attention to building robust and reliable apps. In fact, users easily get frustrated by repeated failures, crashes, and other bugs; hence, they abandon some apps in favor of their competition. In this paper we investigate how the fault- and change-proneness of APIs used by Android apps relates to their success estimated as the average rating provided by the users to those apps. First, in a study conducted on 5,848 (free) apps, we analyzed how the ratings that an app had received correlated with the fault- and change-proneness of the APIs such app relied upon. After that, we surveyed 45 professional Android developers to assess (i) to what extent developers experienced problems when using APIs, and (ii) how much they felt these problems could be the cause for unfavorable user ratings. The results of our studies indicate that apps having high user ratings use APIs that are less fault- and change-prone than the APIs used by low rated apps. Also, most of the interviewed Android developers observed, in their development experience, a direct relationship between problems experienced with the adopted APIs and the users’ ratings that their apps received.

 AIM

The aim of this paper is investigate how the fault- and change-proneness of APIs used by Android apps relates to their success estimated as the average rating provided by the users to those apps

SCOPE

The scope of this paper is analyzed how the ratings that an app had received correlated with the fault- and change-proneness of the APIs such app relied upon.

EXISTING SYSTEM

Stability and fault-proneness in the Android API is a sensitive and timely topic, given the frequent releases and the number of applications that use these APIs. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to provide solid empirical evidence and shed some light on the relationship between the success of apps (in terms of user ratings), and the change- and fault-proneness of the underlying APIs (i.e., Android API and third-party libraries). We designed two case studies. In the first study we analyzed to what extent the APIs fault- and change-proneness affect the user ratings of the Android apps using them, while in the second we investigated to what extent Android developers experience problems when using APIs and how much they feel these problems can be causes of unfavorable user ratings/comments

DISADVANTAGES

·      Users easily get frustrated by repeated failures, crashes, and other bugs

·      They abandon some apps in favor of their competition.

PROPOSED SYSTEM

In this project, the purpose of our study is to investigate whether the change- and fault-proneness of APIs used by the app relates (or not) to the app success, measured by its ratings. That is, a heavy usage of fault-prone APIs can lead to repeated failures or even crashes of the apps, hence encouraging users to give low ratings and possibly even abandoning the apps. Similarly, the use of unstable APIs that undergo numerous changes in their interfaces can cause backward compatibility problems or require frequent updates to the apps using those APIs. Such updates, in turn, can introduce defects into the applications using unstable APIs. Results of our first study demonstrate that Android apps having higher user ratings generally use APIs that are less fault- and change-prone than APIs used by low rated apps.

ADVANTAGES

·      APIs used by apps having high user ratings are significantly less fault-prone than APIs used by low rated apps

·      Our findings highlight the importance of avoiding change-and fault-prone APIs, it must be clear that selecting the best APIs to use is far from trivial

SYSTEM CONFIGURATION

HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS:-

·                Processor          -   Pentium –III

·                Speed                -    1.1 Ghz

·                RAM                 -    256 MB(min)

·                Hard Disk         -   20 GB

·                Floppy Drive    -    1.44 MB

·                Key Board                 -    Standard Windows Keyboard

·                Mouse               -    Two or Three Button Mouse

·                Monitor             -    SVGA

SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS:-

·                Operating System      :Android OS             

·                Front End                  : JAVA

·                Database                  : SqLite

·                Tool                           :Eclipse

  

REFERENCES

Linares-Vasquez, M., Bernal-Cardenas, C.E., Bavota, G, Di Penta, M. “The Impact of API Change- and Fault-Proneness on the User Ratings of Android Apps” IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Volume 41,  Issue 4  November  2014