A Preliminary Study on Mobile Apps Call Graphs through a Complex Network Approach

Mobile apps are certainly a significant part of the software industry market, and their centrality in our economic and social life is becoming more and more relevant as time goes by. In this preliminary work we propose a complex network approach, never used before in this field, to study mobile apps from a software engineering perspective. We analyzed the networks associated to 5 popular open-source android apps, and found that they share some properties with other kinds of software systems. We employed complex networks to obtain a deeper insight both on internal and external dependencies, aiming at studying the relationship between mobile apps dependencies and software quality. Our goal is to better understand the nature of the existing relationship between mobile apps and the underlying hosting operating system thus providing developers with valuable information.