Detecting and Fixing Data Loss Issues in Android Apps

TL;DR

This paper introduces iFixDataloss, an automated tool that detects and repairs data loss issues in Android apps caused by event-driven interruptions, improving app reliability and user experience.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel approach and tool for automatically detecting and fixing data loss issues in Android applications, outperforming existing techniques.

Findings

Detected 374 data loss issues in 66 apps, including 284 previously unknown.

Successfully generated patches for 188 issues, with 16 patches accepted by developers.

Outperformed state-of-the-art techniques in detection and patch quality.

Abstract

Android apps are event-driven, and their execution is often interrupted by external events. This interruption can cause data loss issues that annoy users. For instance, when the screen is rotated, the current app page will be destroyed and recreated. If the app state is improperly preserved, user data will be lost. In this work, we present an approach and tool iFixDataloss that automatically detects and fixes data loss issues in Android apps. To achieve this, we identify scenarios in which data loss issues may occur, develop strategies to reveal data loss issues, and design patch templates to fix them. Our experiments on 66 Android apps show iFixDataloss detected 374 data loss issues (284 of them were previously unknown) and successfully generated patches for 188 of the 374 issues. Out of 20 submitted patches, 16 have been accepted by developers. In comparison with state-of-the-art techniques, iFixDataloss performed significantly better in terms of the number of detected data loss issues and the quality of generated patches.