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UI driven Android application reduction

Authors:

Chen TianAuthors Info & Claims

ASE '17: Proceedings of the 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering

Pages 286 - 296

Published: 30 October 2017 Publication History

Abstract

While smartphones and mobile apps have been an integral part of our life, modern mobile apps tend to contain a lot of rarely used functionalities. For example, applications contain advertisements and offer extra features such as recommended news stories in weather apps. While these functionalities are not essential to an app, they nonetheless consume power, CPU cycles and bandwidth. In this paper, we design a UI driven approach that allows customizing an Android app by removing its unwanted functionalities. In particular, our technique displays the UI and allows the user to select elements denoting functionalities that she wants to remove. Using this information, our technique automatically removes all the code elements related to the selected functionalities, including all the relevant background tasks. The underlying analysis is a type system, in which each code element is tagged with a type indicating if it should be removed. From the UI hints, our technique infers types for all other code elements and reduces the app accordingly. We implement a prototype and evaluate it on 10 real-world Android apps. The results show that our approach can accurately discover the removable code elements and lead to substantial resource savings in the reduced apps.

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Cited By

Xin QZhang QOrso A(2022)Studying and Understanding the Tradeoffs Between Generality and Reduction in Software DebloatingProceedings of the 37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3551349.3556970(1-13)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3551349.3556970
Xin QKim MZhang QOrso AGrundy JLe Goues CLo D(2020)Subdomain-based generality-aware debloatingProceedings of the 35th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3324884.3416644(224-236)Online publication date: 21-Dec-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3324884.3416644

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Guide Proceedings

ASE '17: Proceedings of the 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering

October 2017

1033 pages

ISBN:9781538626849

General Chair:
Grigore Rosu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Massimiliano Di Penta
University of Sannio, Italy
,
Tien N. Nguyen
University of Texas at Dallas, USA

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IEEE Press

Publication History

Published: 30 October 2017

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Overall Acceptance Rate 82 of 337 submissions, 24%

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Cited By

Xin QZhang QOrso A(2022)Studying and Understanding the Tradeoffs Between Generality and Reduction in Software DebloatingProceedings of the 37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3551349.3556970(1-13)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3551349.3556970
Xin QKim MZhang QOrso AGrundy JLe Goues CLo D(2020)Subdomain-based generality-aware debloatingProceedings of the 35th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3324884.3416644(224-236)Online publication date: 21-Dec-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3324884.3416644

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