{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,5,13]],"date-time":"2026-05-13T04:53:20Z","timestamp":1778648000841,"version":"3.51.4"},"reference-count":73,"publisher":"Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)","issue":"2","content-domain":{"domain":["dl.acm.org"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol."],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,28]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>\n                    Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI\/CD) is a well-established practice that automatically builds, tests, packages, and deploys software systems. To adopt CI\/CD, software developers need to configure their projects using dedicated\n                    <jats:monospace>YML<\/jats:monospace>\n                    configuration files. Mobile apps have distinct characteristics with respect to CI\/CD practices, such as testing on various emulators and deploying to app stores. However, little is known about the challenges and added value of adopting CI\/CD in mobile apps and how developers maintain such a practice. In this article, we conduct an empirical study on CI\/CD practices in\n                    <jats:inline-formula content-type=\"math\/tex\">\n                      <jats:tex-math notation=\"LaTeX\" version=\"MathJax\">\\(2{,}557\\)<\/jats:tex-math>\n                    <\/jats:inline-formula>\n                    Android apps adopting 4 popular CI\/CD services, namely GitHub Actions, Travis CI, CircleCI, and GitLab CI\/CD. We also compare our findings with those reported in prior research on general CI\/CD practices to situate them within broader trends. We observe a lack of commonality and standardization across CI\/CD services and Android apps, leading to complex\n                    <jats:monospace>YML<\/jats:monospace>\n                    configurations and associated maintenance efforts. We also observe that CI\/CD configurations focus primarily on the build setup, with around half of the projects performing standard testing and only 9% incorporating deployment. In addition, we find that CI\/CD configurations are changed bi-monthly on average, with frequent maintenance correlating with active issue tracking, project size\/age, and community engagement. Our qualitative analysis of commits uncovered 11 themes in CI\/CD maintenance activities, with over a third of the changes focusing on improving workflows and fixing build issues, whereas another third involves updating the build environment, tools, and dependencies. Our study emphasizes the necessity for automation and AI-powered tools to improve CI\/CD processes for mobile apps and advocates creating adaptable open source tools to efficiently manage resources, especially in testing and deployment.\n                  <\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3736758","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,5,23]],"date-time":"2025-05-23T11:53:35Z","timestamp":1748001215000},"page":"1-40","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":9,"title":["CI\/CD Configuration Practices in Open Source Android Apps: An Empirical Study"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"35","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-9336-7298","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Taher A.","family":"Ghaleb","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Science, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0008-5184-2925","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Osamah","family":"Abduljalil","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Computer Science Department, Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-7090-0475","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Safwat","family":"Hassan","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,1,22]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_3_2_2_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1016\/j.infsof.2018.02.005"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_3_2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Henri A\u00efdasso Mohammed Sayagh and Francis Bordeleau. 2025. Build optimization: A systematic literature review. arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.11940 (2025).","DOI":"10.1145\/3757912"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_4_2","unstructured":"Atlassian. 2025. Continuous Integration vs. Continuous Delivery vs. Continuous Deployment. Retrieved March 2 2025 from https:\/\/www.atlassian.com\/continuous-delivery\/principles\/continuous-integration-vs-delivery-vs-deployment"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_5_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.5555\/944919.944937"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_6_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3597503.3623303"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_7_2","unstructured":"CircleCI. 2025. Continuous Integration. 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