DepAPI: The performance impact of the evolution of APIs

• Published in: Journal of computer languages (Online) Vol. 85; p. 101353
• Main Author: AlDuaij, Naser
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 01.11.2025
• Subjects: APIs; Applications; Deprecated APIs; Mobile and ubiquitous computing; Operating systems; Operating systems; Applications; Performance; Deprecated APIs; Mobile and ubiquitous computing; APIs
• ISSN: 2590-1184
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cola.2025.101353

As mobile systems have become ubiquitous, many developers target mobile systems to develop and release their applications. Platform developers provide API documentation for application developers to rely on. Since application performance is key to providing a usable and scalable mobile application to users, application developers must rely on platform API documentation to carefully design and implement their code. With multiple releases and ongoing development of platforms, these APIs are subject to change and may become deprecated. Platform developers require newer or alternative APIs for application developers in case an API becomes deprecated. Previous studies focused on how API deprecations affect development effort and how APIs evolve, but no prior study has explored the performance impact of these API deprecations. Create a methodology to classify deprecated APIs and study the performance implications of these deprecated APIs. This study, referred to as DepAPI, presents a methodology called DepClassify to identify and classify deprecated APIs in terms of their types. DepClassify provides a method to select the APIs to test based on the most popular applications and their most frequently used APIs. The study also introduces DepTool that applies the methodology using Android as an exemplary operating system and shows the performance impact of API deprecation. This is the first study to investigate the performance impact of API deprecations. The results show that the performance impact is significant enough to warrant the attention of both platform and application developers. Additionally, a specific study in DepAPI with a deprecated user-facing API shows that usability is affected. Based on the results, DepAPI recommends that system developers should provide developers with the performance implications of updating their APIs. Application developers should pay attention to the performance impact when updating their applications to use newer or alternative APIs.