Analysis of Common User Flows in Open-Source Android Applications

Abstract

Many project templates for Android applications can be found on GitHub, but few contain implementations of whole user flows. This thesis focuses on extracting representations of user flows in the form of activity diagrams from existing open-source Android applications, with the goal to develop a project template featuring user flows such as onboarding, user creation and signing in. The activity diagrams of each user flow were combined with the intention of creating a representation of an average user flow that could be applied to most use cases. The project template was developed based on those combined activity diagrams in Android Studio using Kotlin and following a Model-View-ViewModel architecture. The project template was evaluated by recreating user flows of six open-source Android applications and measuring how much of the codebase needed to be changed to achieve a similar user interface. The result indicates that systematically analysing the user flows of existing applications is a useful starting point for creating easily adaptable project templates.