Unveiling the Architecture and Design of Android Applications - An Exploratory Study

This work presents an exploratory study whose goal was to investigate the architectural characteristics of Android’s applications. We selected twelve popular and open-source applications available on the official Android’s store for analysing. Then, we applied techniques of the reverse engineering to each target application in order to investigate three main aspects: (i) architecture of each application; use of the (ii) design patterns; and (iii) expecting handling policies. Support tools were used in order to identify dependencies between architectural components implemented in each target application, and to graphically present those dependencies. Then, based on this analysing, we present a qualitative analysis carried out on the extracted architectures. One of the outcomes consistently detected during this study was an overview of the main architectural choices that have been adopted by Android developers, resulting on formulation of a preliminary conceptual architecture for Android applications.