Characterizing Bugs in Login Processes of Android Applications: An Empirical Study
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 methods with complicated login processes, catering for personalized user experiences. However, the complexities in managing different operations in login processes make it difficult for developers to handle them correctly. In this paper, we present the first empirical study of login issues in Android apps. We analyze 361 issues from 44 popular open-source Android repositories, examining the root causes, symptoms, and trigger conditions of these issues. Our findings indicate that the vast majority of the login issues are induced by the improper handling of complex state transitions during the login process, which can prevent users from logging in or misdirect them to incorrect subsequent actions. Additionally, we observed that issues related to this cause typically require the convergence of multiple trigger conditions to manifest. These findings can help developers to model the login processes which can help them to identify the causes of issues and design targeted test cases and precise test oracles. Our dataset has been made openly available to facilitate future research in this area.
Sun 27 AprDisplayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change
09:00 - 10:30 | App ComprehensionResearch Track / / at 205 Chair(s): Coen De Roover Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Gema Rodríguez-Pérez Department of Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics and Statistics, University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus | ||
09:00 15mDay opening | Welcome by the Chairs Opening | ||
09:15 50mKeynote | Theories of Program Comprehension in the Age of LLMs ICPC Keynotes | ||
10:05 10mTalk | Combining Language and App UI Analysis for the Automated Assessment of Bug Reproduction Steps Research Track Junayed Mahmud University of Central Florida, Antu Saha William & Mary, Oscar Chaparro William & Mary, Kevin Moran University of Central Florida, Andrian Marcus George Mason University Pre-print | ||
10:15 10mTalk | Characterizing Bugs in Login Processes of Android Applications: An Empirical Study Research Track Zixu Zhou McGill University, Rufeng Chen McGill University, Junfeng Chen Southern University of Science and Technology, Yepang Liu Southern University of Science and Technology, Lili Wei McGill University Pre-print | ||
10:25 5mLive Q&A | Session's Discussion: "App Comprehension" Research Track | ||