ICSE 2025
Sat 26 April - Sun 4 May 2025 Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Fri 2 May 2025 16:15 - 16:30 at 207 - Mobile Software Chair(s): Mattia Fazzini

Testing, security analysis, and other dynamic quality assurance approaches rely on mechanisms that invoke software under test, aiming to achieve high code coverage. A large number of invocation mechanisms proposed in the literature, in particular for Android mobile applications, employ GUI-driven application exploration. However, studies show that even the most advanced GUI exploration techniques can cover only around 30% of a real- world application. This paper aims to investigate “the remaining 70%”. By conducting a large-scale experiment involving two human experts, who thoroughly explored 61 benchmark and 42 popular apps from Google Play, we show that achieving a substantially larger coverage for real-world applications is impractical even if we factor out known GUI-based exploration issues, such as the inability to provide semantic inputs and the right order of events. The main reasons preventing humans from covering the entire application include application dependencies on device configurations and external resources. Thus, future investment into GUI-based exploration strategies is unlikely to lead to substantial improvements in coverage. To chart possible ways forward and explore approaches to satisfy/bypass these dependencies, we thoroughly analyze code-level properties guarding them. Our analysis shows that a large fraction of the dependencies could actually be successfully bypassed with relatively simple beyond- GUI exploration techniques. We hope our study can inspire future work in this area and also provide a realistic benchmark for evaluating this work.

Fri 2 May

Displayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change

16:00 - 17:30
Mobile SoftwareResearch Track at 207
Chair(s): Mattia Fazzini University of Minnesota
16:00
15m
Talk
EP-Detector: Automatic Detection of Error-prone Operation Anomalies in Android ApplicationsSecurity
Research Track
Chenkai Guo Nankai University, China, Qianlu Wang College of Cyber Science, Nankai University, Naipeng Dong The University of Queensland, Australia, Lingling Fan Nankai University, Tianhong Wang College of Computer Science, Nankai University, Weijie Zhang College of Computer Science, Nankai University, EnBao Chen College of Cyber Science, Nankai University, Zheli Liu Nankai University, Lu Yu National University of Defense Technology; Anhui Province Key Laboratory of Cyberspace Security Situation Awareness and Evaluation
16:15
15m
Talk
Mobile Application Coverage: The 30% Curse and Ways ForwardArtifact-Available
Research Track
Faridah Akinotcho University of British Columbia, Canada, Lili Wei McGill University, Julia Rubin The University of British Columbia
Pre-print
16:30
15m
Talk
The Design Smells Breaking the Boundary between Android Variants and AOSP
Research Track
Wuxia Jin Xi'an Jiaotong University, Jiaowei Shang Xi'an Jiaotong University, Jianguo Zheng Xi'an Jiaotong University, Mengjie Sun Xi’an Jiaotong University, Zhenyu Huang Honor Device Co., Ltd., Ming Fan Xi'an Jiaotong University, Ting Liu Xi'an Jiaotong University
16:45
15m
Talk
Scenario-Driven and Context-Aware Automated Accessibility Testing for Android Apps
Research Track
Yuxin Zhang Tianjin University, Sen Chen Nankai University, Xiaofei Xie Singapore Management University, Zibo Liu College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University, Lingling Fan Nankai University
17:00
15m
Talk
TacDroid: Detection of Illicit Apps through Hybrid Analysis of UI-based Transition Graphs
Research Track
Yanchen Lu Zhejiang University, Hongyu Lin Zhejiang University, Zehua He Zhejiang University, Haitao Xu Zhejiang University, Zhao Li Hangzhou Yugu Technology, Shuai Hao Old Dominion University, Liu Wang Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Haoyu Wang Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Kui Ren Zhejiang University
17:15
15m
Talk
PacDroid: A Pointer-Analysis-Centric Framework for Security Vulnerabilities in Android AppsSecurityArtifact-FunctionalArtifact-AvailableArtifact-ReusableAward Winner Best Artifact
Research Track
Menglong Chen Nanjing University, Tian Tan Nanjing University, Minxue Pan Nanjing University, Yue Li Nanjing University