Measuring While Playing Fair: An Empirical Analysis of Language and Framework Usage in the iOS App Store

Reverse engineering research has mainly focused on binaries compiled from C and C++, however, in the iOS ecosystem, neither of these languages are the focus of application developers. Apple provides their own languages with Objective-C and Swift as the official choices, while third party cross-platform frameworks, like Microsoft’s.NET MAUI, Jetpack Compose, Flutter or even React Native promise unified development across iOS and Android. To investigate the relevance of languages for R&D efforts in software understanding, we conduct a historical analysis spanning 84,432 distinct iOS applications over the past five years.