Exploiting the Progress of OO Refactoring Tools with Android Code Smells

Mobile applications market is facing a stronger demand continuously, due to the growing popularity of mobile phones. A demand that forces developers to rush the implementation process and shorten the conception phase, leading to poor conception and implementation choices known as code smells. These smells have a negative effect on both device and application's performance, and must therefore be corrected to ensure the quality of mobile applications and the smoothness of their users' experience. This task requires the identification of the infected entities and their refactoring. Most existing refactoring approaches and techniques are focused on object-oriented applications' code smells while only a few of them are destined to Android specific code smells. In this paper, we present a tool, named RAndroid, that handles automatic refactoring for four different Android specific code smells, and gives recommendations on how to manually refactor a fifth one. RAndroid is built as an Android Studio plugin adapting the logic of the well-known oriented-object refactoring tool "JDeodorant" [13] as it's first layer. We evaluated RAndroid on 52 real-world open-source Android applications, developed by both experts and beginners, covering 194 code smell instances.