Investigating Software Developers' Challenges for Android Permissions in Stack Overflow

• Main Authors: Oishwee, Sahrima Jannat, Stakhanova, Natalia, Codabux, Zadia
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 31-10-2023
• Subjects: Computer Science - Software Engineering
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2311.00074

The Android permission system is a set of controls to regulate access to
sensitive data and platform resources (e.g., camera). The fast evolving nature
of Android permissions, coupled with inadequate documentation, results in
numerous challenges for third-party developers. This study investigates the
permission-related challenges developers face and the solutions provided to
resolve them on the crowdsourcing platform Stack Overflow. We conducted
qualitative and quantitative analyses on 3,327 permission-related questions and
3,271 corresponding answers. Our study found that most questions are related to
non-evolving SDK permissions that remain constant across various Android
versions, which emphasizes the lack of documentation. We classify developers'
challenges into several categories: Documentation-Related, Problems with
Dependencies, Debugging, Conceptual Understanding, and Implementation Issues.
We further divided these categories into 12 subcategories, nine
sub-subcategories, and nine sub-sub-subcategories. Our analysis shows that
developers infrequently identify the restriction type or protection level of
permissions, and when they do, their descriptions often contradict Google's
official documentation. Our study indicates the need for clear, consistent
documentation to guide the use of permissions and reduce developer
misunderstanding leading to potential misuse of Android permission. These
insights from this study can inform strategies and guidelines for permission
issues. Future studies should explore the effectiveness of Stack Overflow
solutions to form best practices and develop tools to address these problems.