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MOBILESoft 2021
Mon 17 - Wed 19 May 2021
co-located with ICSE 2021
Wed 19 May 2021 16:45 - 16:55 at MOBILESoft Room - Kotlin Chair(s): Alessandra Gorla

Android apps have been traditionally built using Java since the inception of Android. However, Google announced Kotlin as an official supported language for the Android platform in May 2017. Since then, the popularity of Kotlin for Android projects has steadily increased, to the point that Google announced in 2019 that “Android development will be Kotlin-first” with nearly 60% of the top 1,000 Android apps containing Kotlin code. Yet, the transition from Java to Kotlin seems gradual and most applications still partially use Java. Outside open-source apps, little is known about the real proportion of code written in Kotlin inside apps. This paper supports a better understanding of the adoption of Kotlin in the Android ecosystem. We propose an approach to identify the language, Java or Kotlin, in which a class bytecode of an Android Package Kit (APK) originate from. We applied our model on more than 200k closed-source APKs from app stores and found that (i) most of the apps classes are still written in Java, indicating a mitigated adoption of Kotlin in less popular apps, (ii) the penetration of Kotlin is steadily increasing since 2017. We believe our insights are valuable to assess the adoption of Kotlin at large.

Wed 19 May

Displayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change

16:15 - 18:00
KotlinPlenary / Technical Papers at MOBILESoft Room
Chair(s): Alessandra Gorla IMDEA Software Institute
16:15
15m
Talk
SequalsK – a Bidirectional Swift-Kotlin-Transpiler
Technical Papers
Dominik Schultes Technische Hochschule Mittelhessen
Media Attached
16:30
15m
Talk
KotlinDetector: Towards Understanding the Implications of Using Kotlin in Android Applications
Technical Papers
Fadi Mohsen University of Groningen, Loran Oosterhaven University of Groningen, Fatih Turkmen University of Groningen
Media Attached
16:45
10m
Short-paper
Quantifying the Adoption of Kotlin on Android Stores: Insight from the Bytecode
Technical Papers
Geoffrey Hecht University of Chile, Alexandre Bergel University of Chile
DOI Pre-print Media Attached
16:55
20m
Live Q&A
Q&A and Discussion
Technical Papers

17:15
15m
Talk
MOBILESoft 2022
Plenary

Media Attached
17:30
30m
Day closing
Closing and discussion
Plenary

Media Attached

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