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AndroLib: Third-Party Software Library Recommendation for Android Applications

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Reuse in Emerging Software Engineering Practices (ICSR 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 12541))

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Abstract

Android mobile applications (apps) rely heavily on third-party libraries as a means to save time, reduce implementation costs, and increase software quality while offering rich, robust, and up-to-date features to end users. The selection of third-party libraries is an essential element in any software development project, and particularly, in Android apps given the fast-changing and evolving mobile app ecosystem. Indeed, deciding which libraries to choose is a challenging problem, especially with the exponentially increasing number of available libraries in the Android ecosystem. In this paper, we introduce, AndroLib, a novel approach to recommend third-party libraries for Android apps. In particular, we formulate the problem as a multi-objective combinatorial problem and use the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) as a search method to find and recommend relevant libraries. We aim at guiding the search process towards the best trade-off three objectives to be optimized (i) maximize libraries historical co-usage, (ii) maximize libraries functional diversity, and (iii) maximize libraries reuse from highly rated apps. We conduct an empirical experiment to evaluate our approach on a benchmark of real-world Android apps libraries. Results show the effectiveness of AndroLib compared with three recent state-of-the-art library recommendation approaches.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/07/android-passes-2-5-billion-monthly-active-devices.

  2. 2.

    https://android-arsenal.com.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/facebook/facebook-android-sdk.

  4. 4.

    https://github.com/bumptech/glide.

  5. 5.

    https://github.com/square/picasso.

  6. 6.

    https://github.com/facebook/fresco.

  7. 7.

    https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.9366341.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ecole de Technologie Superieure, University of Quebec, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Moataz Chouchen & Ali Ouni

  2. Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, USA

    Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer

Authors
  1. Moataz Chouchen
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  2. Ali Ouni
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  3. Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ali Ouni .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Manouba University, Tunis, Tunisia

    Sihem Ben Sassi

  2. University of Lille, Inria, CNRS, Lille, France

    Stéphane Ducasse

  3. Université du Québec à Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada

    Hafedh Mili

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Chouchen, M., Ouni, A., Mkaouer, M.W. (2020). AndroLib: Third-Party Software Library Recommendation for Android Applications. In: Ben Sassi, S., Ducasse, S., Mili, H. (eds) Reuse in Emerging Software Engineering Practices. ICSR 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12541. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64694-3_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64694-3_13

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-64693-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-64694-3

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