An Empirical Analysis of Compatibility Issues for Industrial Mobile Games (Practical Experience Report)
Mobile games face severe compatibility issues amid extreme device and OS version fragmentation, yet existing research lacks systematic empirical analysis. This study conducts a large-scale industrial empirical investigation, constructing the first production-grade mobile game defect dataset—comprising 7 million lines of code and 20,000 commits. Through rigorous manual annotation, root-cause categorization, and repair-strategy clustering, we systematically identify six primary compatibility root-cause categories and their corresponding repair patterns—the first such classification in the literature. We further propose reusable diagnostic guidelines and proactive prevention recommendations, demonstrably improving incident response efficiency. This work fills a critical gap in empirical software engineering research on industrial mobile game compatibility, providing both theoretical foundations and practical paradigms for testing, diagnosis, and remediation.