Work

Measuring While Playing Fair: An Empirical Analysis of Language and Framework Usage in the iOS App Store

Year: 2025

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: Reverse engineering research has mainly focused on binaries compiled from C and C++, however, in the iOS ecosystem, neither of these languages are the focus of application developers. Apple provides their own languages with Objective-C and Swift as the official choices, while third party cross-platform frameworks, like Microsoft’s.NET MAUI, Jetpack Compose, Flutter or even React Native promise unified development across iOS and Android. To investigate the relevance of languages for R&D efforts in software understanding, we conduct a historical analysis spanning 84,432 distinct iOS applications over the past five years.

DOI: 10.1145/3733822.3764671

Authors: Florian Magin, Fabian Scherf, Martin Renze, Cléo Fischer, Gwendal Patat

Institutions: Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology, National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE

Language: English

Topic: Software Engineering Research

Subfield: Information Systems

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: gold

Funders: Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, Hessisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kunst

OpenAlex ID: W4415721997

FWCI: 2.332

Cites: 4

Cited by: 3

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