Department of Information Science, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin 9054, New Zealand.

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Abstract—In line with growing awareness of the need for systems to adapt quickly to change, there has been increasing interest in the evolution of software systems. Research has particularly considered developer-led activities change over time. Comparatively less consideration has been given to the study of software evolution as driven by the wider community of stakeholders. Although, a project’s wider community is central to the feedback system and project success. We have contributed to such efforts and studied the evolution of architecture issues and non-functional requirements in the Android project, as identified by the wider Android community1. We mined the Android issues tracker, employing n-gram analysis in our examination of 21,547 issues. We observe that most architecture-related issues were located in Android application layer, and these issues increased with time. Additionally, usability-related concerns were reported most when they were held to be given greatest attention. Outcomes suggests that Android’s open model and shared ownership have positively impacted Google’s success, which could provide a useful lesson for other similar projects.

Index Terms—Android, android architecture, android non-functional requirements, software evolution, data mining and N-gram analysis.

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Cite: Sherlock A. Licorish, "Exploring the Prevalence and Evolution of Android Concerns: A Community Viewpoint," Journal of Software vol. 11, no. 9, pp. 848-869, 2016.