An Empirical Analysis of Android Apps Bug and Automated Testing Approach for Android Apps

Abstract

Android platforms and its applications (apps) have gained tremendous popularity recently, hence the reliability of Android apps is becoming increasingly important. Due to the novelty of the Android platform, apps are prone to errors, which would affect user experience and requires frequent bug fixes. In this paper, an empirical study on bugs in some widely-used open-source Android apps from diverse categories such as media, tools and communication were performed. Based on the findings of the empirical study, an approach for automating the testing process for detecting Android apps GUI bugs was presented. We show how the approach helped to re-discover existing bugs and find new bugs, and how it could be used to prevent certain bug categories. Our empirical study and automated testing approach have the potential to help developers increase the quality of Android apps.