Static analysis of android apps for lifecycle conformance

Zein, Samer; Salleh, Norsaremah; Grundy, John

doi:10.1109/icitech.2017.8079982

Cited by 7 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…As with other mobile platforms android cannot preserve the state of an app during lifecycle changes due to the lack of system resources (Franke et al, 2012). Thus the developers themselves must ensure that no data is lost when the state changes (Franke et al, 2011;Zein et al, 2017). An activity changes its state due to some event such as the mobile phone receiving an incoming call, a user interaction event, or starting another activity to mention a few.…”

Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Developers must follow Android lifecycle model documentation offered by the Android vendor (Franke et al, 2012). The Google official website is the main portal for the Android developer, it contains the guidelines of the Android development model lifecycle and documentation (Zein et al, 2017). The Android activity lifecycle model shown in Fig.…”

Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, mobile devices offer the same functionality as PC through wireless, web browsers, video and audio. At the same time, the mobile app development is not a trivial task and has its own challenges (Zein et al, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Each activity makes transitions between these states due to some events, such as receiving an incoming call, by calling a specific callback method (Joorabchi et al, 2013). Android developers need to have good understanding of the lifecycle model in order to develop apps that function correctly (Franke et al, 2011;2012;Zein et al, 2017). Google documentation provides narrative information about the lifecycle model to assist developers in building robust apps (Franke et al, 2011).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Google documentation provides narrative information about the lifecycle model to assist developers in building robust apps (Franke et al, 2011). However, a large fraction of Android developers are known to be novices and amateurs who may not properly understand or follow the lifecycle model and will end up with unreliable and faulty apps (Zein et al, 2017). Additionally, there are as yet no automated testing tools available for Android that enable developers to fully check the correctness of the app adherence to the lifecycle model (Zein et al, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

A Static Analysis of Android Source Code for Lifecycle Development Usage Patterns

Hoshieah

Zein

Salleh

et al. 2019

Journal of Computer Science

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Building robust Android apps is a non-trivial task that requires skilled developers to understand various Android platform peculiarities. However, among the Android developers community, a large fractions are considered to be novice and inexperienced developers. One of the main peculiarities in the Android app development is the activity lifecycle model. A developer needs to have deep understanding of the different lifecycle states and callback methods that an Android activity can go through during its runtime. These callback methods are called by the system whenever an app activity changes its state. The developer needs to override appropriate callback methods correctly to avoid app memory leaks and data loss or other phone resource compromise. Detailed static analysis of software applications provides actionable insights and helps us to understand how applications are actually built. Although there have been many studies focusing on static analysis of Android apps in the areas of testing, quality, design, privacy and security; no studies to date focus on lifecycle development practices and usage patterns thus far. In this paper, we analyzed 842 open-source Android apps containing 5577 activities to explore and understand how Android developers actually comply with best practices regarding the Android activity lifecycle model. We developed a tool named SAALC that is capable of analyzing Android activities and extracting valuable information about lifecycle callback methods usage. Our results show, which callback methods are implemented and the nature of the code they contain. The results also show incorrect implementation of the callback methods and incorrect acquiring and releasing of system resources in many Android apps and we argue that a relatively large fraction of Android developers do not sufficiently well understand the app lifecycle model. We also discuss our results in comparison to the Android app lifecycle model best practices.

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Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%