RuntimeDroid: Restarting-Free Runtime Change Handling for Android Apps ∗ Umar Farooq Zhijia Zhao University of California, Riverside University of California, Riverside
[email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT Apps Issues Portable devices, like smartphones and tablets, are often subject to Weather&Clock [9] 3-7 seconds delay runtime configuration changes, such as screen orientation changes, ImapNote 2 [3] loss of inputs screen resizing, keyboard attachments, and language switching. Vlille Checker [8] overlapped GUI When handled improperly, such simple changes can cause serious Alarm Klock [1] app crash runtime issues, from data loss to app crashes. This work presents, to our best knowledge, the first formative Figure 1: An example runtime change and its issues. study on runtime change handling with 3,567 Android apps. The study not only reveals the current landscape of runtime change KEYWORDS handling, but also points out a common cause of various runtime change issues – activity restarting. On one hand, the restarting Runtime Configuration Change, Android, Event Handling facilitates the resource reloading for the new configuration. On ACM Reference Format: the other hand, it may slow down the app, and more critically, it Umar Farooq and Zhijia Zhao. 2018. RuntimeDroid: Restarting-Free Run- requires developers to manually preserve a set of data in order to time Change Handling for Android Apps . In MobiSys ’18: The 16th An- recover the user interaction state after restarting. nual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, Based on the findings of this study, this work further introduces a June 10–15, 2018, Munich, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13 pages.