SAMOA -- A Visual Software Analytics Platform for Mobile Applications

Mobile applications, also known as apps, are dedicated software systems that run on handheld devices, such as smartphones and tablet computers. The apps business has in a few years turned into a multi-billion dollar market. From a software engineering perspective apps represent a new phenomenon, and there is a need for tools and techniques to analyze apps. We present SAMOA, a visual web-based software analytics platform for mobile applications. It mines software repositories of apps and uses a set of visualization techniques to present the mined data. We describe SAMOA, detail the analyses it supports, and describe a methodology to understand apps from a structural and historical perspective. The website of SAMOA, containing the screen cast of the tool demo, is located at http://samoa.inf.usi.ch/about.