Web API Fragility: How Robust is Your Mobile Application?

Abstract

Web APIs provide a systematic and extensible approach for application-to-application interaction. A large number of mobile applications makes use of Web APIs to integrate services into apps. Each Web API's evolution pace is determined by their respective developer and mobile application developers are forced to accompany the API providers in their software evolution tasks. In this paper we investigate whether and how mobile application developers deal with the added distress of Web APIs evolving. In particular, we studied how robust 43 high profile mobile applications are when dealing with mutated Web API responses. Additionally, we interviewed three mobile application developers to better understand their choices and trade-offs regarding Web API integration.