How are Contracts Used in Android Mobile Applications?

Abstract

Formal contracts and assertions are effective methods to enhance software quality by enforcing preconditions, postconditions, and invariants. However, the adoption and impact of contracts in the context of mobile application development, particularly of Android applications, remain unexplored. We present the first large-scale empirical study on the presence and use of contracts in Android applications, written in Java or Kotlin. We consider 2,390 applications and five categories of contract elements: conditional runtime exceptions, APIs, annotations, assertions, and other. We show that most contracts are annotation-based and are concentrated in a small number of applications. © 2024 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.