An Empirical Study of Android Changes in CyanogenMod

Many phone vendors use Android as their underlying OS, but often extend it to add new functionality and to make it compatible with their specific phones. When a new version of Android is released, phone vendors need to re-apply or merge their customizations and changes to the new release. This is a difficult and time-consuming process, which often leads to late adoption of new versions. Ideally, automated support that can merge the vendor-specific changes with the changes that happened in the new release would speed up the process. In this paper, we perform an empirical study to determine the feasibility of such support. We study the changes in seven versions of CyanogenMod, a community-based customized variant of Android, and their corresponding Android versions. By taking the nature of these changes into account, we assess their overlap to identify potential conflicts. Our results show that 58% of the changes have the potential to be safely automated.