Related papers: The Android Update Problem: An Empirical Study
To satisfy varying customer needs, device vendors and OS providers often rely on the open-source nature of the Android OS and offer customized versions of the Android OS. When a new version of the Android OS is released, device vendors and…
Fragmentation is a serious problem in the Android ecosystem. This problem is mainly caused by the fast evolution of the system itself and the various customizations independently maintained by different smartphone manufacturers. Many…
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…
Many developers and organizations implement apps for Android, the most widely used operating system for mobile devices. Common problems developers face are the various hardware devices, customized Android variants, and frequent updates,…
Enabling fully automated testing of mobile applications has recently become an important topic of study for both researchers and practitioners. A plethora of tools and approaches have been proposed to aid mobile developers both by…
Mobile operating systems evolve quickly, frequently updating the APIs that app developers use to build their apps. Unfortunately, API updates do not always guarantee backward compatibility, causing apps to not longer work properly or even…
The major mobile platforms, Android and iOS, have introduced changes that restrict user tracking to improve user privacy, yet apps continue to covertly track users via device fingerprinting. We study the opportunity to improve this dynamic…
The open-source nature of the Android OS makes it possible for manufacturers to ship custom versions of the OS along with a set of pre-installed apps, often for product differentiation. Some device vendors have recently come under scrutiny…
This paper analyzes the phenomenon of software aging - namely, the gradual performance degradation and resource exhaustion in the long run - in the Android OS. The study intends to highlight if, and to what extent, devices from different…
The reliability of mobile devices is a challenge for vendors, since the mobile software stack has significantly grown in complexity. In this paper, we study how to assess the impact of faults on the quality of user experience in the Android…
Android Apps are frequently updated, every couple of weeks, to keep up with changing user, hardware and business demands. Correctness of App updates is checked through extensive testing. Recent research has proposed tools for automated GUI…
Software aging -- the phenomenon affecting many long-running systems, causing performance degradation or an increasing failure rate over mission time, and eventually leading to failure - is known to affect mobile devices and their operating…
Mobile devices are used more and more in everyday life. They are our cameras, wallets, and keys. Basically, they embed most of our private information in our pocket. For this and other reasons, mobile devices, and in particular the software…
End-users play an integral role in identifying requirements, validating software features' usefulness, locating defects, and in software product evolution in general. Their role in these activities is especially prominent in online…
Mobile applications, often simply called "apps", are increasingly widespread, and we use them daily to perform a number of activities. Like all software, apps must be adequately tested to gain confidence that they behave correctly.…
In this paper, we perform a comprehensive study of 2,470 patched Android vulnerabilities that we collect from different data sources such as Android security bulletins, CVEDetails, Qualcomm Code Aurora, AOSP Git repository, and Linux…
Vendors in the Android ecosystem typically customize their devices by modifying Android Open Source Project (AOSP) code, adding in-house developed proprietary software, and pre-installing third-party applications. However, research has…
Performance issues in Android applications significantly undermine users' experience, engagement, and retention, which is a long-lasting research topic in academia. Unlike functionality issues, performance issues are more difficult to…
Android instrumentation tests (end-to-end tests that run on a device or emulator) can catch problems that simpler tests miss. However, running these tests automatically in continuous integration (CI) is often difficult because emulator…
The login functionality, being the gateway to app usage, plays a critical role in both user experience and application security. As Android apps increasingly incorporate login functionalities, they support a variety of authentication…