When developing new software, third-party libraries are commonly used to reduce implementation efforts. However, even these libraries undergo evolution activities to offer new functionalities and fix bugs or security issues. The research community has mainly investigated third-party libraries in the context of desktop applications, while only little is known regarding the mobile context. In this paper, we bridge this gap by investigating when, how, and why mobile developers update third-party libraries. By mining 2752 mobile apps, we study (i) whether mobile developers update third-party libraries, (ii) how much such apps lag behind the latest version of their dependencies, (iii) which are the categories of libraries that are more prone to be updated, and (iv) what are the common patterns followed by developers when updating a library. Then, we perform a survey with 73 mobile developers that aims at shedding lights on the reasons why they update (or not) third-party libraries. We find that mobile developers rarely update libraries, and when they do, they mainly tend to update libraries related to the Graphical User Interface. Avoiding bug propagation and making the app compatible with new Android releases are the top reasons why developers update their libraries.

中文翻译：

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移动应用程序中的第三方库

在开发新软件时，通常使用第三方库来减少实施工作。然而，即使是这些库也会经历进化活动以提供新功能并修复错误或安全问题。研究界主要研究了桌面应用程序上下文中的第三方库，而对移动上下文知之甚少。在本文中，我们通过调查移动开发人员更新第三方库的时间、方式和原因来弥合这一差距。通过挖掘 2752 个移动应用程序，我们研究 (i) 移动开发者是否更新第三方库，(ii) 此类应用程序落后于其依赖项的最新版本，(iii) 哪些是更容易更新第三方库的类别更新，以及 (iv) 开发人员在更新库时遵循的常见模式是什么。然后，我们对 73 位移动开发人员进行了一项调查，旨在阐明他们更新（或不更新）第三方库的原因。我们发现移动开发者很少更新库，当他们更新时，他们主要倾向于更新与图形用户界面相关的库。避免错误传播并使应用与新的 Android 版本兼容是开发人员更新其库的首要原因。