Automating Release of Deep Link APIs for Android Applications

TL;DR

This paper presents Aladdin, an automated approach combining static and dynamic analysis to enable deep link support in Android apps, reducing manual effort and improving accessibility of app content.

Contribution

It introduces Aladdin, a novel cooperative framework that automates deep link generation for existing Android apps with minimal developer involvement.

Findings

Aladdin effectively automates deep link release for Android apps.

Deep links are rarely adopted in current Android applications.

Aladdin reduces manual effort required for deep link support.

Abstract

Unlike the Web where each web page has a global URL to reach, a specific "content page" inside a mobile app cannot be opened unless the user explores the app with several operations from the landing page. Recently, deep links have been advocated by major companies to enable targeting and opening a specific page of an app externally with an accessible uniform resource identifier (URI). To empirically investigate the state of the practice on adopting deep links, in this article, we present the largest empirical study of deep links over 20,000 Android apps, and find that deep links do not get wide adoption among current Android apps, and non-trivial manual efforts are required for app developers to support deep links. To address such an issue, we propose the Aladdin approach and supporting tool to release deep links to access arbitrary location of existing apps. Aladdin instantiates our novel cooperative framework to synergically combine static analysis and dynamic analysis while minimally engaging developers to provide inputs to the framework for automation, without requiring any coding efforts or additional deployment efforts. We evaluate Aladdin with popular apps and demonstrate its effectiveness and performance.