Logging Practices with Mobile Analytics: An Empirical Study on Firebase

Understand

Software logs are of great value in both industrial and open-source projects.

• Mobile analytics logging enables developers to collect logs remotely from their apps running on end user devices at the cost of recording and transmitting logs across the Internet to a centralised infrastructure.
• This paper makes a first step in characterising logging practices with a widely adopted mobile analytics logging library, namely Firebase Analytics.
• We provide an empirical evaluation of the use of Firebase Analytics in 57 open-source Android applications by studying the evolution of code-bases to understand: a) the needs-in-common that push practitioners to adopt logging practices on mobile devices, and b) the differences in the ways developers use local and remote logging.