Nowadays, energy efficiency is recognized as a core quality attribute of applications (apps) running on Android-powered devices constrained by their battery. Indeed, energy hogging apps are a liability to both the end-user and software developer. Yet, there are very few tools available to help developers increase the quality of their native code by ridding it of energy-related bugs. Android Studio is the official IDE for millions of developers worldwide and there’s no better place to enforce green coding rules in everyday projects. Indeed, Android Studio provides a code scanning tool called Android lint that can be extended with lacking green checks in order to foster the design of more eco-responsible apps.

Link to Publication: http://olegoaer.perso.univ-pau.fr/works/ase19-amobile-1.pdf

Olivier Le Goaer

LIUPPA, Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour

France

In recent years, various benchmark suites have been developed to evaluate the efficacy of Android security analysis tools. The choice of such benchmark suites used in tool evaluations is often based on the availability and popularity of suites and not on their characteristics and relevance. One of the reasons for such choices is the lack of information about the characteristics and relevance of benchmark suites.

In this context, we empirically evaluated four Android-specific benchmark suites: DroidBench, Ghera, IccBench, and UBCBench. For each benchmark suite, we identified the APIs used by the suite that were discussed on Stack Overflow in the context of Android app development and measured the usage of these APIs in a sample of 227K real-world apps (coverage). We also identified security-related APIs used in real-world apps but not in any of the above benchmark suites to assess the opportunities to extend benchmark suites (gaps).

Joydeep Mitra

Kansas State University

United States

Venkatesh-Prasad Ranganath

Kansas State University

Aditya Narkar

In the field of software analysis a trade-off between scalability and accuracy always exists. In this respect, Android app analysis is no exception, in particular, analyzing large or many apps can be challenging. Dealing with many small apps is a typical challenge when facing micro-benchmarks such as DROIDBENCH or ICC-BENCH. These particular benchmarks are not only used for the evaluation of novel tools but also in continuous integration pipelines of existing mature tools to maintain and guarantee a certain quality-level. Considering this latter usage it becomes very important to be able to achieve benchmark results as fast as possible. Hence, benchmarks have to be optimized for this purpose. One approach to do so is app merging. We implemented the Android Merge Tool (AMT) following this approach and show that its novel aspects can be used to produce scaled up and accurate benchmarks. For such benchmarks Android app analysis tools do not suffer from the scalability-accuracy trade-off anymore. We show this throughout detailed experiments on DROIDBENCH employing three different analysis tools (AMANDROID, ICCTA, FLOWDROID). Benchmark execution times are largely reduced without losing benchmark accuracy. Moreover, we argue why AMT is an advantageous successor of the state-of-the-art app merging tool (APKCOMBINER) in analysis lift-up scenarios.

Felix Pauck

Paderborn University, Germany

Germany

Shikun Zhang