Finding resume and restart errors in android applications

Zhiyong Shan, Tanzirul Azim, Iulian Neamtiu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

19 Scopus citations

Abstract

Smartphone apps create and handle a large variety of "instance" data that has to persist across runs, such as the current navigation route, workout results, antivirus settings, or game state. Due to the nature of the smartphone platform, an app can be paused, sent into background, or killed at any time. If the instance data is not saved and restored between runs, in addition to data loss, partially-saved or corrupted data can crash the app upon resume or restart. While smartphone platforms offer API support for data-saving and data-retrieving operations, the use of this API is ad-hoc: left to the programmer, rather than enforced by the compiler. We have observed that several categories of bugs-including data loss, failure to resume/restart or resuming/restarting in the wrong state-are due to incorrect handling of instance data and are easily triggered by just pressing the 'Home' or 'Back' buttons. To help address this problem, we have constructed a tool chain for Android (the KRE finder static analysis and the KREreproducer input generator) that helps find and reproduce such incorrect handling. We have evaluated our approach by running the static analysis on 324 apps, of which 49 were further analyzed manually. Results indicate that our approach is (i) effective, as it has discovered 49 bugs, including in popular Android apps, and (ii) efficient, completing on average in 61 seconds per app. More generally, our approach helps determine whether an app saves too much or too little state.

Original languageAmerican English
Title of host publicationOOPSLA 2016 - Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications
EditorsEelco Visser, Yannis Smaragdakis
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages864-880
Number of pages17
ISBN (Electronic)9781450344449
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 19 2016
Event2016 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, OOPSLA 2016 - Amsterdam, Netherlands
Duration: Oct 31 2016Nov 1 2016

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications, OOPSLA
Volume02-04-November-2016

Other

Other2016 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, OOPSLA 2016
Country/TerritoryNetherlands
CityAmsterdam
Period10/31/1611/1/16

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software

Keywords

  • App testing
  • Data loss
  • Google android
  • Mobile applications
  • Software restart
  • Static analysis

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