Understanding Third-Party Libraries in Mobile App Analysis

Abstract

Third-party libraries are widely used in mobile apps. Recent studies showed that third-party libraries account for more than 60% of the code in Android apps on average. As a result, program analysis on Android apps typically requires detecting or removing third-party libraries first, because they usually introduce significant noises and affect the analysis results. In this technical briefing, we will introduce the latest research advances related to third-party libraries used in mobile apps. The briefing will be focused on: (1) the importance of third-party libraries, including the current status, types and distribution, based on the analysis results on over 1 million Android apps, (2) how to detect third-party libraries from Android apps, including an overview of existing approaches and their limitations, (3) the implications of third-party libraries in software engineering tasks such as mobile app analysis, as well as case studies from the domain of program analysis and mobile security, (4) future challenges and research directions related to third-party libraries.