Related papers: AndroidCompass: A Dataset of Android Compatibility…
Privacy concerns have long been expressed around smart devices, and the concerns around Android apps have been studied by many past works. Over the past 10 years, we have crawled and scraped data for almost 1.9 million apps, and also stored…
The proper use of Android app permissions is crucial to the success and security of these apps. Users must agree to permission requests when installing or running their apps. Despite official Android platform documentation on proper…
Android OS is severely fragmented by API updates and device vendors' OS customization, creating a market condition where vastly different OS versions coexist. This gives rise to compatibility crash problems where Android apps crash on…
Mobile apps are predominantly integrated with cloud services to benefit from enhanced functionalities. Adopting authentication using secrets such as API keys is crucial to ensure secure mobile-cloud interactions. However, developers often…
The Android ecosystem is vulnerable to issues such as app repackaging, counterfeiting, and piracy, threatening both developers and users. To mitigate these risks, developers often employ code obfuscation techniques. However, while effective…
Building Android applications reliably remains a persistent challenge due to complex dependencies, diverse configurations, and the rapid evolution of the Android ecosystem. This study conducts an empirical analysis of 200 open-source…
Android apps are event-driven, and their execution is often interrupted by external events. This interruption can cause data loss issues that annoy users. For instance, when the screen is rotated, the current app page will be destroyed and…
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…
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…
The Android ecosystem is profoundly fragmented due to the frequent updates of the Android system and the prevalent customizations by mobile device manufacturers. Previous research primarily focused on identifying and repairing…
Many Android applications collect data from users. The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires vendors to faithfully disclose which data their apps collect. This task is complicated because many apps use…
Resource leak bugs in Android apps are pervasive and can cause serious performance degradation and system crashes. In recent years, several resource leak detection techniques have been proposed to assist Android developers in correctly…
Android applications are frequently plagiarized or repackaged, and software obfuscation is a recommended protection against these practices. However, there is very little data on the overall rates of app obfuscation, the techniques used, or…
Android has been the most popular smartphone system with multiple platform versions active in the market. To manage the application's compatibility with one or more platform versions, Android allows apps to declare the supported platform…
The permission mechanism in the Android Framework is integral to safeguarding the privacy of users by managing users' and processes' access to sensitive resources and operations. As such, developers need to be equipped with an in-depth…
Mobile phones have developed into complex platforms with large numbers of installed applications and a wide range of sensitive data. Application security policies limit the permissions of each installed application. As applications may…
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…
Android apps must be able to deal with both stop events, which require immediately stopping the execution of the app without losing state information, and start events, which require resuming the execution of the app at the same point it…
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…
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…