Do android developers neglect error handling? a maintenance-Centric study on the relationship between android abstractions and uncaught exceptions

This paper presents an empirical study on the relationship between the usage of Android abstractions and uncaught exceptions. Our approach is quantitative and maintenance-centric. We analyzed changes to both normal and exception handling code in 112 versions extracted from 16 software projects covering a number of domains, amounting to more than 3 million LOC. Change impact analysis and exception flow analysis were performed on those versions of the projects. The main finding of this study is that, during the evolution of the analyzed apps, an increase in the use of Android abstractions exhibits a positive and statistically significant correlation with the number of uncaught exception flows. Since uncaught exceptions cause apps to crash, this result suggests that these apps are becoming potentially less robust as a consequence of exception handling misuse. Analysis of multiple versions of these apps revealed that Android developers usually employ abstractions that may throw exceptions without adding the appropriate handlers for these exceptions. This study highlights the need for better testing and verification tools with a focus on exception handling code and for a change of culture in Android development or, at least, in the design of its APIs.