Paper Info
Title
Understanding and Detecting Fragmentation-Induced Compatibility Issues for Android Apps
Abstract
Android ecosystem is heavily fragmented. The numerous combinations of different device models and operating system versions make it impossible for Android app developers to exhaustively test their apps, and thus various compatibility issues arise. Unfortunately, little is known on the characteristics of such fragmentation-induced compatibility issues. No mature tools exist to help developers quickly diagnose and fix these issues. To bridge the gap, we conducted an empirical study on 220 real-world compatibility issues collected from five popular open-source Android apps. We further interviewed Android practitioners and conducted an online survey to gain insights from real practices. Via the studies, we characterized compatibility issues, investigated common practices to handle compatibility issues, and disclosed that these issues exhibit common patterns. With these findings, we propose a technique, FicFinder, to automatically detect compatibility issues in Android apps. FicFinder performs static code analysis based on a model that captures Android APIs as well as their associated context by which compatibility issues can be triggered. FicFinder reports actionable debugging information to developers when it detects potential issues. We evaluated FicFinder with 53 large-scale open-source Android apps. The results show that FicFinder can precisely detect compatibility issues in these apps and uncover previously-unknown issues.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/TSE.2018.2876439
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Mobile applications,android applications,android fragmentation,compatibility issues,empirical study,program analysis
Journal
46
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
11
0098-5589
3
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.39
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Lili Wei1916.51
Yepang Liu241524.58
S. C. Cheung32657162.89
Huaxun Huang4181.67
xuan lu516212.01
xuanzhe liu616713.94