A First Step Towards Detecting Values-violating Defects in Android APIs

TL;DR

This paper explores the detection of human values violations in Android APIs, proposing algorithms that identify potential issues and revealing correlations with app characteristics like viruses and popularity.

Contribution

It introduces novel algorithms for detecting human values violations in Android apps and evaluates their effectiveness on a large dataset.

Findings

High performance of the detection algorithms.

Correlation between value violations and app viruses.

More violations found in less popular and social apps.

Abstract

Human values are an important aspect of life and should be supported in ubiquitous technologies such as mobile applications (apps). There has been a lot of focus on fixing certain kinds of violation of human values, especially privacy, accessibility, and security while other values such as pleasure, tradition, and humility have received little focus. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between human values and Android API services and developed algorithms to detect potential violation of these values. We evaluated our algorithms with a manually curated ground truthset resulting in a high performance, and applied the algorithms to 10,000 apps. Our results show a correlation between violation of values and the presence of viruses. Our results also show that apps with the lowest number of installations contain more violation of values and the frequency of the violation of values was highest in social apps.