Abstract
Design patterns help software developers in building better software designs as well as fostering software maintainability and re-usability. Recently, mobile applications, apps hereinafter, have gained much ground in critical domains, such as banking, health, payments, and military, just to mention a few. Accordingly, it has become imperative to consider increasing the apps' code quality, which urges to better usage of design patterns. Although there is plethora of studies that discuss design patterns usage in object-oriented languages such as Java, C++, and C#, to our best of knowledge, no studies have discussed design patterns usage for Android apps. This study performs an exploratory research using static code analysis methods and a sample of more than 1400 Android apps toward finding design patterns implemented inside their source code. We extend our PatRoid framework, which detects all design patterns in Android app source code. Our initial results show that there is a variation in the extent in which design patterns are applied among different Android apps’ categories. Overall, we argue that there is still a lack of proper usage of design patterns in Android apps development.