Identifying Compatibility-Related APIs by Exploring Biased Distribution in Android Apps

Abstract

With the prosperity of Android, developers need to deal with the compatibility issues among different devices, which is costly. In this paper, we propose an automated and general approach named ICARUS to identify compatibility-related APIs in Android apps. The insight of our approach is that the compatibility-related API has the biased distribution among code segments, which is similar to the distribution of keywords among documents. It motivates us to leverage statistical features to discriminate compatibility-related APIs from normal APIs. Experimental results on apps demonstrate the effectiveness of our work.