Scene-Driven Exploration and GUI Modeling for Android Apps

TL;DR

SceneDroid is a novel scene-driven exploration approach that significantly improves GUI scene extraction and transition coverage in Android apps, aiding development, reverse engineering, and testing.

Contribution

The paper introduces SceneDroid, a new method combining smart exploration, state fuzzing, and indirect launching to enhance GUI modeling with high coverage and fine granularity.

Findings

168.74% increase in transition pair coverage

162.42% increase in scene extraction

Potential to support app development and testing

Abstract

Due to the competitive environment, mobile apps are usually produced under pressure with lots of complicated functionality and UI pages. Therefore, it is challenging for various roles to design, understand, test, and maintain these apps. The extracted transition graphs for apps such as ATG, WTG, and STG have a low transition coverage and coarse-grained granularity, which limits the existing methods of graphical user interface (GUI) modeling by UI exploration. To solve these problems, in this paper, we propose SceneDroid, a scene-driven exploration approach to extracting the GUI scenes dynamically by integrating a series of novel techniques including smart exploration, state fuzzing, and indirect launching strategies. We present the GUI scenes as a scene transition graph (SceneTG) to model the GUI of apps with high transition coverage and fine? grained granularity. Compared with the existing GUI modeling tools, SceneDroid has improved by 168.74% in the coverage of transition pairs and 162.42% in scene extraction. Apart from the effectiveness evaluation of SceneDroid, we also illustrate the future potential of SceneDroid as a fundamental capability to support app development, reverse engineering, and GUI regression testing.