XTrace: A Non-Invasive Dynamic Tracing Framework for Android Applications in Production
Qi Hu, Jiangchao Liu, Xin Yu, Lin Zhang, Edward Jiang

TL;DR
XTrace is a non-invasive, high-performance dynamic tracing framework for Android apps that enables real-time monitoring and debugging in production without modifying the VM, effectively diagnosing crashes and bottlenecks.
Contribution
XTrace introduces a novel non-invasive proxying approach leveraging Android ART's built-in instrumentation for stable, efficient, and broad-compatibility dynamic tracing in production environments.
Findings
Demonstrated minimal overhead (<7 ms startup latency, <0.01 ms per call) in large-scale deployment
Confirmed no significant impact on crash or ANR rates in production
Improved root-cause localization efficiency by over 90%
Abstract
As the complexity of mobile applications grows exponentially and the fragmentation of user device environments intensifies, ensuring online application stability faces unprecedented challenges. Traditional methods, such as static logging and post-crash analysis, lack real-time contextual information, rendering them ineffective against "ghost bugs" that only manifest in specific scenarios. This highlights an urgent need for dynamic runtime observability: intercepting and tracing arbitrary methods in production without requiring an app release. We propose XTrace, a novel dynamic tracing framework. XTrace introduces a new paradigm of non-invasive proxying, which avoids direct modification of the virtual machine's underlying data structures. It achieves high-performance method interception by leveraging and optimizing the highly stable, built-in instrumentation mechanism of the Android ART…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSoftware Testing and Debugging Techniques · Advanced Malware Detection Techniques · Software System Performance and Reliability
