Taming Exceptions in Android Applications

Abstract

The popularity of the Android platform can be attributed to their ability to run apps, end-user programs that leverage the many capabilities of mobile devices, potentially in unforeseen ways. Apps are in widespread use and App crashing is the most common cause of complaints about Android mobile phone apps according to recent studies. Android apps are usually written in the Java programming language. Java includes an exception handling mechanism that allows programs to signal the occurrence of errors by throwing exceptions and to handle these exceptions by catching them. All the Android-specific abstractions, such as activities and asynctasks, can throw exceptions when errors occur. When an app catches the exceptions that it or the libraries upon which it depends throw, it can resume its activity or, at least, fail in a graceful way. On the other hand, uncaught exceptions make the app crash. The exception handling mechanism for the Android platform has two liabilities: (1) the "Terminate ALL" approach and (2) a lack of a holistic view on exceptional behavior. This research investigates the relationship between Android abstractions and robustness of apps during evolution and proposes a new exception handling mechanism to tame exceptions in Android applications.