Taxonomy of security weaknesses in Java and Kotlin Android apps

Android is nowadays the most popular operating system in world, not only realm of mobile devices, but also when considering desktop and laptop computers. Such a popularity makes it an attractive target for security attacks, due to sensitive information often manipulated by apps. The latter are going through transition which ecosystem moving from usage Java as official language developing apps, adoption Kotlin first choice supported Google. While previous studies have partially studied weaknesses affecting there no comprehensive empirical investigation studying software apps (and comparing) two main languages used their development, namely Kotlin. We present study we: (i) manually analyze 681 commits including fixed developers with goal defining taxonomy highlighting types apps; (ii) survey 43 validate complement our taxonomy. Based on findings, we propose list future actions that could be performed researchers practitioners improve