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Static window transition graphs for Android

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Abstract

This work develops a static analysis to create a model of the behavior of an Android application’s GUI. We propose the window transition graph (WTG), a model representing the possible GUI window sequences and their associated events and callbacks. A key component and contribution of our work is the careful modeling of the stack of currently-active windows, the changes to this stack, and the effects of callbacks related to these changes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first detailed study of this important static analysis problem for Android. We develop novel analysis algorithms for WTG construction and traversal, based on this modeling of the window stack. We also propose WTG extensions to handle certain aspects of asynchronous control flow. We describe an application of the WTG for GUI test generation, using path traversals. The evaluation of the proposed algorithms indicates their effectiveness and practicality.

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Notes

  1. There is a related callback onPrepareOptionsMenu; for simplicity, it is not discussed here, but our implementation handles it.

  2. The discussion assumes Android version 8.0; some earlier versions have slight variations in certain sequences of callbacks.

  3. Since the lifetime of a menu/dialog is contained within the lifetime of its owner, closing an owner implies that all owned windows have been closed.

  4. In general, w could have multiple owners, e.g., due to subclassing of activities; the necessary algorithmic generalizations are straightforward.

  5. An alternative would be to traverse all acyclic paths, without a length limit.

  6. There is also a separate mechanism which uses a Handler to send messages to the targeted thread, but its analysis is beyond the scope of this work.

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Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under CCF-1319695 and CCF-1526459, and by a Google Faculty Research Award.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Google Inc., Mountain View, CA, USA

    Shengqian Yang & Dacong Yan

  2. Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    Haowei Wu, Hailong Zhang, Yan Wang, Chandrasekar Swaminathan & Atanas Rountev

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  1. Shengqian Yang
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  2. Haowei Wu
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  3. Hailong Zhang
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  4. Yan Wang
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Correspondence to Haowei Wu.

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Yang, S., Wu, H., Zhang, H. et al. Static window transition graphs for Android. Autom Softw Eng 25, 833–873 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10515-018-0237-6

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