A Quantitative and Qualitative Investigation of Performance-Related Commits in Android Apps

Performance is nowadays becoming a crucial issue for mobile apps, as they are often implementing computational-intensive features, are being used for mission-critical tasks, and, last but not least, a pleasant user experience often is a key factor to determine the success of an app. This paper reports a study aimed at preliminarily investigating to what extent developers take care of performance issues in their commits, and explicitly document that. The study has been conducted on commits of 2,443 open source Android apps, of which 180 turned out to contain a total of 457 documented performance problems. We classified performance-related commits using a card sorting approach, and found that the most predominant kinds of performance-related changes include GUI-related changes, fixing code smells, network-related code, and memory management.