  Many developers and organizations implement apps for Android, the most widely
used operating system for mobile devices. Common problems developers face are
the various hardware devices, customized Android variants, and frequent
updates, forcing them to implement workarounds for the different versions and
variants of Android APIs used in practice. In this paper, we contribute the
Android Compatibility checkS dataSet (AndroidCompass) that comprises changes to
compatibility checks developers use to enforce workarounds for specific Android
versions in their apps. We extracted 80,324 changes to compatibility checks
from 1,394 apps by analyzing the version histories of 2,399 projects from the
F-Droid catalog. With AndroidCompass, we aim to provide data on when and how
developers introduced or evolved workarounds to handle Android
incompatibilities. We hope that AndroidCompass fosters research to deal with
version incompatibilities, address potential design flaws, identify security
concerns, and help derive solutions for other developers, among others-helping
researchers to develop and evaluate novel techniques, and Android app as well
as operating-system developers in engineering their software.
