The evolution of mobile apps: an exploratory study

As mobile apps continue to grow in popularity, it is important to study their evolution. Lehman's laws of software evolution have been proposed and used to study the evolution of traditional, large software systems (also known as desktop apps). However, do Lehman's laws of software evolution hold for mobile apps?, especially since developing mobile apps presents different challenges compared to the development of desktop apps. In this paper, we examine the applicability of three of Lehman's laws on mobile apps. In particular, we focused on three laws: the law of continuing change, increasing complexity, and declining quality. We extracted a number of metrics and performed a case study on two applications: VLC and ownCloud. Our findings show that the law of continuing change and declining quality seem to apply for mobile apps, however, we find different outcomes for the law of increasing complexity. Then, we compare the mobile app version to the desktop version and find that the two versions follow the same trends for the law of continuing change. On the contrary, the desktop and mobile version have different trends for the law of increasing complexity and the law of declining quality.