Web API Fragility: How Robust is Your Web API Client
This addresses the problem of web API fragility for mobile application developers, highlighting incremental insights into how they handle API changes.
The paper investigated the robustness of 48 high-profile mobile applications when dealing with mutated web API responses, finding that many applications were not adequately prepared for API evolution, as revealed through testing and interviews with three developers.
Web APIs provide a systematic and extensible approach for application-to-application interaction. A large number of mobile applications makes use of web APIs to integrate services into apps. Each Web API's evolution pace is determined by their respective developer and mobile application developers are forced to accompany the API providers in their software evolution tasks. In this paper we investigate whether mobile application developers understand and how they deal with the added distress of web APIs evolving. In particular, we studied how robust 48 high profile mobile applications are when dealing with mutated web API responses. Additionally, we interviewed three mobile application developers to better understand their choices and trade-offs regarding web API integration.