How Do Android Operating System Updates Impact Apps?

Mobile devices are practically ubiquitous in today's society. People are increasingly dependent on mobile devices, for uses such as computation, navigation, storing private information, and web browsing among others. Thus, developers are required to produce high quality mobile apps. However, mobile operating systems are frequently updated, which can affect the functionality of mobile apps and hinder developers' ability to consistently provide high quality apps across multiple operating systems versions. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for automatically locating the part of Android apps that have been affected by an update of the underlying Android mobile operating system, and statistically analyzing the impact of the update. Preliminary evaluation shows that the overall impact of an operating system update is low.