An Empirical Study on Quality of Android Applications written in Kotlin language
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Context: During the last years, developers of mobile applications have the possibility to use new paradigms and tools for developing their mobile applications. For instance, since 2017 Android developers have the official support to write their Android applications using Kotlin language. Kotlin is programming language 100 and functional features. Objective: The goal of this paper is twofold. First, it aims to study the degree of adoption of Kotlin language on development of Android applications and to measure the amount of Kotlin code inside Android application. Secondly, it aims to measure the quality of Android applications that are written using Kotlin and to compare it with the quality of Android application purely written using Java. Method: We first define a method to detect Kotlin applications from a dataset of open-source Android applications. Then, we analyze those apps to detect instances of code smells and compute an estimation of quality of the apps. Finally, we study how the introduction of Kotlin code impacts on the quality of an Android application. Results: Our experiment found that 11.78 925 open source apps have been written (partially or fully) using Kotlin language. We found that after the introduction of Kotlin code in existing Android application written in Java, the quality of the majority of such applications increase.
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