A Comparison of Bugs Across the iOS and Android Platforms of Two Open Source Cross Platform Browser Apps

Abstract

Mobile app developers want to maximize their revenue and hence want to reach as large an audience as possible. In order to do this, they need to build apps for multiple platforms - like Google's Android and Apple's iOS, and maintain them in parallel. Past research has examined properties of the issues addressed in either Android or iOS, but not to compare the work between both. Our main motivation has been to determine if there were differences in how issues manifest themselves in iOS and Android, when we control for the projects, by considering the same apps across multiple platforms. In this paper, we compare issues across two mobile platforms --- iOS and Android --- for two open source browsers --- Mozilla Firefox and Google Chromium. We consider three dimensions of study: frequency of issue report submission, fixing time of issues, and type of issues (using topic modeling on the issue description to generate the categories). We found that there were indeed differences; in particular, we found that there were more issues in the Android version of the apps and the gap with the iOS version is increasing. We observe that in both apps the fix time and type of issues are different for each platform. We also noted certain kinds of issues that may be more prevalent for different browser/platform combinations. This can advise project leads in identifying and allocating development resources to address key problem areas. Hence, issue reports seem more dependent on the platform than on the mobile app, making development and maintenance effort hard to estimate.