Paper Info
Title
A tale of two cities: how WebView induces bugs to Android applications.
Abstract
WebView is a widely used Android component that augments a native app with web browser capabilities. It eases the interactions between an app’s native code and web code. However, the interaction mechanism of WebView induces new types of bugs in Android apps. Understanding the characteristics and manifestation of these WebView-induced bugs (ωBugs for short) facilitates the correct usages of WebViews in Android apps. This motivates us to conduct the first empirical study on ωBugs based on those found in popular open-source Android apps. Our study identified the major root causes and consequences of ωBugs and made interesting observations that can be leveraged for detecting and diagnosing ωBugs. Based on the empirical study, we further propose an automated testing technique ωDroid to effectively expose ωBugs in Android apps. In our experiments, ωDroid successfully discovered 30 unique and previously-unknown ωBugs when applied to 146 open-source Android apps. We reported the 30 ωBugs to the corresponding app developers. Out of these 30 ωBugs, 14 were confirmed and 7 of them were fixed. This shows that ωDroid can effectively detect ωBugs that are of the developers’ concern.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1145/3238147.3238180
ASE
Keywords
Field
DocType
Empirical study, Android system WebView, GUI testing
World Wide Web,Android (operating system),Web browser,Computer science,Theoretical computer science,Machine code,Graphical user interface testing,Empirical research
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1527-1366
978-1-4503-5937-5
5
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.44
31
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jiajun Hu1403.06
Lili Wei2916.51
Yepang Liu341524.58
S. C. Cheung42657162.89
Huaxun Huang5181.67