FILO: FIx-LOcus Recommendation for Problems Caused by Android Framework Upgrade

Abstract

Dealing with the evolution of operating systems is challenging for developers of mobile apps, who have to deal with frequent upgrades that often include backward incompatible changes of the underlying API framework. As a consequence of framework upgrades, apps may show misbehaviours and unexpected crashes once executed within an evolved environment.Identifying the portion of the app that must be modified to correctly execute on a newly released operating system can be challenging. Although incompatibilities are visibile at the level of the interactions between the app and its execution environment, the actual methods to be changed are often located in classes that do not directly interact with any external element.To facilitate debugging activities for problems introduced by backward incompatible upgrades of the operating system, this paper presents FILO, a technique that can recommend the method that must be changed to implement the fix from the analysis of a single failing execution. FILO can also select key symptomatic anomalous events that can help the developer understanding the reason of the failure and facilitate the implementation of the fix.Our evaluation with multiple known compatibility problems introduced by Android upgrades shows that FILO can effectively and efficiently identify the faulty methods in the apps.

Automatically Detecting API-induced Compatibility Issues in Android Apps: A Comparative Analysis (Replicability Study)

“…Xia et al [59] conduct a large-scale study on the practice of handling OS-induced API compatibility issues and their solutions, and they propose a tool named RAPID to ascertain whether a compatibility issue has been resolved. Mobilio et al [41] acquaint a tool named FILO which can assist Android designers in tackling backward compatibility issues caused by API upgrades. FILO is designed to recognize app methods that need to be altered to adapt to the API changes and report symptoms observed in failed executions to facilitate repair.…”

Proactive Libraries: Enforcing Correct Behaviors in Android Apps

“…Dynamic patch injection can be used to quickly deploy fixes in apps [22,37]. However, since patches are produced offline, healing is only achieved with the intervention of the app developer, similarly to program repair techniques [12,13,20]. This mechanism can be useful to solve important vulnerabilities, but it cannot be used for immediate and automatic healing of failing executions.…”