Android APIs are updated frequently, making it critical to analyze the impact of these updates on Android apps to ensure their reliability. In this paper, we introduce APICIA, a tool that can be used for analyzing the impact of API changes on Android apps. APICIA identifies program elements such as classes, methods, and statements that have been affected, along with affected tests and untested affected code following the target API update. Our evaluation on 31 real-world Android apps shows that APICIA can be cost-effective by pinpointing only 35.31% of tests per app on average that may exhibit different behaviors (e.g. app crashes) due to the API update. Furthermore, since many of the affected statements are not covered by existing tests, APICIA can also aid developers in expanding their test suite to cover these statements. APICIA is publicly available at https://github.com/TSUMahmud/apicia and a screencast presenting the demonstration of APICIA is available at https://tinyurl.com/apicia-tool.
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Mahmud et al. (2024) studied this question.
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