A High-Level Modeling Language for the Efficient Design, Implementation, and Testing of Android Applications

Abstract

Developing mobile applications remains difficult, time consuming, and error-prone, in spite of the number of existing platforms and tools. In this paper, we define MoDroid, a high-level modeling language to ease the development of Android applications. MoDroid allows developing models representing the core of applications. MoDroid provides Android programmers with the following advantages: (1) Models are built using highlevel primitives that abstract away several implementation details; (2) It allows the definition of interfaces between models to automatically compose them; (3) Java native android can be automatically generated along with the required permissions; (4) It supports efficient model-based testing that operates on models. MoDroid is fully implemented and was used to develop several non-trivial Android applications.