Classification of Android APIs Posts : An analysis of developer’s discussions on Stack Overflow

Abstract

Discussions concerning mobile applications development are growing significantly in the recent years in questions and answers websites such as Stack Overflow (SO). Developers commonly resort to Stack Overflow to solve their technical issues and seek professional help. In this paper, we aim to analyze developers’ discussions about Android APIs in order for us to understand how these questions evolve over the years and what answers could possibly contain (code, URL). Therefore, we suggest a novel classification technique to identify the Android APIs that are being most discussed. The proposed technique is based on the official online documentation of Android APIs and the Random Forest Classifier algorithm (RFC). Our findings show that the most discussed Android APIs by developers on SO is “google.android.collect”.