This is the replication package for our paper "Towards Understanding Android APIs: Official Lists, Vendor Customizations, and Real-World Usage", accepted to EASE 2026 (30th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering).
Android API Lists (AALs) are essential for app development, security analysis, and system evolution. We perform a multi-dimensional analysis on four major AALs: JAR, TXT, XML, and CSV.
The artifacts are organized by research questions and scoping analysis:
| Directory | Description |
|---|---|
| aosp-statistics/ | Scoping analysis of AOSP source code (LOC and language statistics). |
| rq1/ | RQ1: Completeness & Consistency. Data collection and preprocessing of AALs. |
| rq2/ | RQ2: Overlap & Divergence. Comparative analysis using Venn diagrams and manual labeling. |
| rq3/ | RQ3: Runtime Availability. Real-world device validation using our AAL-Reflector tool. |
| rq4/ | RQ4: Ecosystem Usage. Large-scale APK analysis using our APK-Analyzer. |
Contains scripts to extract and normalize API signatures from different formats:
JAR-Extractor: Extract APIs fromandroid.jar.currenttxt_signature_converter.py: Parser forcurrent.txtfiles.
An Android application to verify API availability via Java reflection on physical and virtual devices. It uses FreeReflection to bypass non-SDK interface restrictions.
A Maven-based tool to perform static analysis on APKs to identify which AALs cover the APIs used by real-world applications.
If you use this dataset or our tools in your research, please cite our EASE 2026 paper:
@inproceedings{aal_ease2026,
title={Towards Understanding Android APIs: Official Lists, Vendor Customizations, and Real-World Usage},
author={Sinan Wang and Qi Zhang and Jiacheng Li and Lili Wei and Yida Tao and Yepang Liu},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE)},
year={2026},
publisher={ACM}
}Note: The detailed results regarding usage of non-removed APIs (mentioned in the Introduction) are available in rq4/README.md.