Aladdin: Automating Release of Deep-Link APIs on Android Yun Ma12, Ziniu Hu1, Yunxin Liu3, Tao Xie4, Xuanzhe Liu1∗ 1Key Lab of High-Confidence Software Technology, MoE (Peking University) 2Tsinghua University 3Microsoft Research 4University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign {mayun,bull}@pku.edu.cn,
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[email protected] ABSTRACT fundamental role on the Web in various aspects, e.g., enabling users Compared to the Web where each web page has a global URL for ex- to navigate among web pages and add bookmarks to interested ternal access, a specific “page” inside a mobile app cannot be easily contents, and making search engines capable of crawling the web accessed unless the user performs several steps from the landing contents [18]. page of this app. Recently, the concept of “deep link” is expected to In the current era of mobile computing, mobile applications be a promising solution and has been advocated by major service (a.k.a., apps) have become the dominant entrance to access the providers to enable targeting and opening a specific page of an app Internet [11, 41]. However, compared to the Web, the support for externally with an accessible uniform resource identifier. In this “hyperlinks” is inherently missing in mobile apps so that users have paper, we present a large-scale empirical study to investigate how to perform tedious and trivial actions to access a specific in-app deep links are really adopted, over 25,000 Android apps. To our content. Other advantages from traditional Web hyperlinks are surprise, we find that deep links have quite low coverage, e.g., more naturally missing as well.