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

Mobile apps are certainly a significant part of thesoftware industry market, and their centrality in our economicand social life is becoming more and more relevant as time goesby. In this preliminary work we propose a complex networkapproach, never used before in this field, to study mobileapps from a software engineering perspective. We analyzed thenetworks associated to 5 popular open-source android apps, and found that they share some properties with other kinds ofsoftware systems. We employed complex networks to obtain adeeper insight both on internal and external dependencies, aimingat studying the relationship between mobile apps dependenciesand software quality. Our goal is to better understand thenature of the existing relationship between mobile apps and theunderlying hosting operating system thus providing developerswith valuable information.