Security code smells in apps: are we getting better?

Users increasingly rely on mobile apps for everyday tasks, including security- and privacy-sensitive tasks such as online banking, e-health, and e-government. Additionally, a wealth of sensors captures the movements and habits of the users for fitness tracking and convenience. Despite legal regulations imposing requirements and limits on the processing of privacy-sensitive data, users must still trust the app developers to apply suffcient protections. In this paper, we investigate the state of security in Android apps and how security-related code smells have evolved since the introduction of the Android operating system.