Related papers: Demystifying Device-specific Compatibility Issues …
System auditing on Android faces two problems. First, existing syscall tracers lose events under load, silently overwriting entries faster than a user space reader can drain them. Second, security-relevant application behavior is mediated…
Privacy, security, and accessibility, like ethical concerns in mobile applications (a.k.a. apps), commonly subsumed under non-functional requirements, are generally reported by users through app reviews available in app stores. However,…
Modern automated accessibility testing tools for mobile applications have significantly improved the detection of interface violations, yet their impact on remediation remains limited. A key reason is that existing tools typically produce…
Mobile software engineering has been a hot research topic for decades. Our fellow researchers have proposed various approaches (with over 7,000 publications for Android alone) in this field that essentially contributed to the great success…
Currently, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are becoming increasingly popular to facilitate data transfer in a variety of mobile applications. These APIs often process sensitive user information through their endpoints, which are…
Peer code review has been found to be effective in identifying security vulnerabilities. However, despite practicing mandatory code reviews, many Open Source Software (OSS) projects still encounter a large number of post-release security…
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…
Google has mandated developers to use Data Safety Sections (DSS) to increase transparency in data collection and sharing practices. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of Google's Data Safety Section (DSS) using both…
Usability and user experience (UX) issues are often not well emphasized and addressed in open source software (OSS) development. There is an imperative need for supporting OSS communities to collaboratively identify, understand, and fix UX…
App markets have evolved into highly competitive and dynamic environments for developers. While the traditional app life cycle involves incremental updates for feature enhancements and issue resolution, some apps deviate from this norm by…
Context:The extent of post-release use of software affects the number of faults, thus biasing quality metrics and adversely affecting associated decisions. The proprietary nature of usage data limited deeper exploration of this subject in…
The recent evolution on the smart phone technology has made its application market huge and less secure. Every single day large number of apps introduced in the android market (mostly on google play store) without any particular inspections…
While there have been various studies towards Android apps and their development, there is limited discussion of the broader class of apps that fall in the fake area. Fake apps and their development are distinct from official apps and…
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…
Context and Motivation: Due to their increasing complexity, everyday software systems are becoming increasingly opaque for users. A frequently adopted method to address this difficulty is explainability, which aims to make systems more…
In the modern, fast-moving world of e-commerce, many Android apps face challenges in providing a simple and secure shopping experience. Many of these apps, often enough, have complicated designs that prevent users from finding what they…
End-users seldom read verbose privacy policies, leading app stores like Google Play to mandate simplified data safety declarations as a user-friendly alternative. However, these self-declared disclosures often contradict the full privacy…
Android devices are equipped with many pre-installed applications which have the capability of tracking and monitoring users. Although applications coming pre-installed pose a great danger to user security and privacy, they have received…
Android's Private Compute Core (PCC) is a secure, isolated environment within the operating system, that maintains separation from apps while enabling users and developers to maintain control over their data. It is backed by open-source…
Native code is now commonplace within Android app packages where it co-exists and interacts with Dex bytecode through the Java Native Interface to deliver rich app functionalities. Yet, state-of-the-art static analysis approaches have…