How Android developers handle evolution-induced API compatibility issues
Hao Xia, Yuan Zhang, Yingtian Zhou, Xiaoting Chen, Yang Wang, Xiangyu Zhang, Shuaishuai Cui, Geng Hong, Xiaohan Zhang, Min Yang, Zhemin Yang
Abstract
As Android platform evolves in a fast pace, API-related compatibility issues become a significant challenge for developers. To handle an incompatible API invocation, developers mainly have two choices: merely performing sufficient checks to avoid invoking incompatible APIs on platforms that do not support them, or gracefully providing replacement implementations on those incompatible platforms. As providing more consistent app behaviors, the latter one is more recommended and more challenging to adopt. However, it is still unknown how these issues are handled in the real world, do developers meet difficulties and what can we do to help them.