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 paper, 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.
We have released our measurement code on github.
Monitor Infrastructure The monitor infrastructure is implemented based on CrashCapturer, a user-space tool for capturing
app crash events in a timely and comprehensive manner. Root Cause Analysis Pipeline Our root cause analysis pipeline is implemented in preprocess.py and clustering.py. Our Countmeasures The countmeasures include a novel class SingletonPlus and the heuristic testing algorithm in MainActivity.java and Utils.java.
We have provided in part the measurement data on github.
The attributes of each crash event in the data are organized as follows:
| Attribute | Description |
|---|---|
| issue_id | ID generated to identify an app crash event. |
| os_version | Android version. |
| device_id | Unique ID generated to identify a user's device which the reported event crashed on. |
| crash_time | Time when the reported crash event occured on the device. |
| crash_reason | A brief summary of the crash reason of the reported event. |
| crash_type | Type of throwing Exception/Error. |