Taming Android fragmentation: characterizing and detecting compatibility issues for Android apps

Wei, Lili; Liu, Yepang; Cheung, Shing-Chi

doi:10.1145/2970276.2970312

Cited by 167 publications

(79 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…This might be due to the complexity of the APIs implemented by the library, tacit assumptions about the library, and the complexity of the applications that use the library. For example, Android apps are particularly prone to incorrect interactions with their libraries [6,34,54,55].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Controlling Interactions with Libraries in Android Apps Through Runtime Enforcement

Riganelli

Micucci

Mariani

2019

ACM Trans. Auton. Adapt. Syst.

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Android applications are executed on smartphones equipped with a variety of resources that must be properly accessed and controlled, otherwise the correctness of the executions and the stability of the entire environment might be negatively affected. For example, apps must properly acquire, use, and release microphones, cameras, and other multimedia devices otherwise the behaviour of the apps that use the same resources might be compromised.Unfortunately, several apps do not use resources correctly, for instance due to faults and inaccurate design decisions. By interacting with these apps users may experience unexpected behaviours, which in turn may cause instability and sporadic failures, especially when resources are accessed.In this paper, we present an approach that lets users protect their environment from the apps that use resources improperly by enforcing the correct usage protocol. This is achieved by using software enforcers that can observe executions and change them when necessary. For instance, enforcers can detect that a resource has been acquired but not released, and automatically perform the release operation, thus giving the possibility to use that same resource to the other apps.The main idea is that software libraries, in particular the ones controlling access to resources, can be augmented with enforcers that can be activated and deactivated on demand by users to protect their environment from unwanted app behaviours. We call the software libraries augmented with one or more enforcers proactive libraries because the activation of the enforcer decorates the library with proactive behaviours that can guarantee the correctness of the execution despite the invocation of the operations implemented by the library. For example, enforcers can detect that a resource has not been released on time and proactively release it.Our experimental results with 27 possible misuses of resources in real Android apps reveal that proactive libraries are able to effectively correct library misuses with negligible runtime overheads. Controlling Interactions with Libraries in Android Apps Through Runtime Enforcement • :3to fix a detected problem). For example, when the onStop() callback is generated, the enforcer associated with the library for audio recording is triggered to check if the microphone has been released. If not, the enforcer may force the release of the microphone, and automatically reassign it to the activity once the activity becomes visible to the user again.Since a regular library does not need to be modified to be turned into a proactive library, enforcers can be easily added to existing libraries, without the need of designing libraries as proactive libraries from the very beginning. This eases the incremental adoption of the technology. Moreover, any party may contribute to the definition of the enforcers for a given library and not only the developers of the library. This aspect may facilitate the proliferation of the enforcers. App developers can keep using the usual testing and analysis methods ...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Controlling Interactions with Libraries in Android Apps Through Runtime Enforcement

Riganelli

Micucci

Mariani

2019

ACM Trans. Auton. Adapt. Syst.

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“…API updates and implementation (e.g., SDKs, core libraries) changes can affect the robustness of apps. Device fragmentation [89] aggravates this problem. For example, Service should be started explicitly since Android 5.0; the change of the comparison contract of Collections#sort() [47] since JDK 7 crashes several apps since the developers are unaware of this.…”

Section: Rq2: Taxonomy Of Framework Exceptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Large-scale analysis of framework-specific exceptions in Android apps

Fan

Chen

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering

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Mobile apps have become ubiquitous. For app developers, it is a key priority to ensure their apps' correctness and reliability. However, many apps still suffer from occasional to frequent crashes, weakening their competitive edge. Large-scale, deep analyses of the characteristics of real-world app crashes can provide useful insights to guide developers, or help improve testing and analysis tools. However, such studies do not exist -this paper fills this gap. Over a four-month long effort, we have collected 16,245 unique exception traces from 2,486 open-source Android apps, and observed that framework-specific exceptions account for the majority of these crashes. We then extensively investigated the 8,243 frameworkspecific exceptions (which took six person-months): (1) identifying their characteristics (e.g., manifestation locations, common fault categories), (2) evaluating their manifestation via state-of-the-art bug detection techniques, and (3) reviewing their fixes. Besides the insights they provide, these findings motivate and enable follow-up research on mobile apps, such as bug detection, fault localization and patch generation. In addition, to demonstrate the utility of our findings, we have optimized Stoat, a dynamic testing tool, and implemented ExLocator, an exception localization tool, for Android apps. Stoat is able to quickly uncover three previously-unknown, confirmed/fixed crashes in Gmail and Google+; ExLocator is capable of precisely locating the root causes of identified exceptions in real-world apps. Our substantial dataset is made publicly available to share with and benefit the community. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Software testing and debugging; * Ting Su, Lihua Xu and Geguang Pu are the corresponding authors. Lingling Fan and Ting Su contributed equally to this work.

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“…Many of these upgrades are intentionally not backward compatible and app developers struggle adapting their apps to newer versions of the framework, as witness by the many discussions opened on Stack Overflow every time a framework upgrade is released [28]. When these upgrades are not handled properly, apps might be affected by fragmentation-induced compatibility issues [3], as well as maintenance and security issues [29].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Mobilio

Rignaelli

Micucci

et al. 2019

2019 IEEE 30th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE)

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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.

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Taming Android fragmentation: characterizing and detecting compatibility issues for Android apps

Cited by 167 publications

References 22 publications

Controlling Interactions with Libraries in Android Apps Through Runtime Enforcement

Controlling Interactions with Libraries in Android Apps Through Runtime Enforcement

Large-scale analysis of framework-specific exceptions in Android apps

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

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