Abstract
Android system has been widely deployed in energy-constrained IoT devices for many practical applications, such as smart phone, smart home, healthcare, fitness, and beacons. However, Android users oftentimes suffer from app crashes, which directly disrupt user experience and could lead to data loss. Till now, the community have limited understanding of their prevalence, characteristics, and root causes. In this article, we make an in-depth study of the crash events regarding ten very popular apps of different genres, based on fine-grained system-level traces crowd-sourced from 93 million Android devices. We find that app crashes occur prevalently on the various hardware models studied, and better hardware does not seem to essentially relieve the problem. Most importantly, we unravel multi-fold root causes of app crashes, and pinpoint that the most crashes stem from the subtle yet crucial inconsistency between app developers’ supposed memory/process management model and Android’s actual implementations. We design practical approaches to addressing the inconsistency; after large-scale deployment, they reduce 40.4% of the app crashes with negligible system overhead. In addition, we summarize important lessons learned from this study, and have released our measurement code/data to the community.
Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
