research-article

Checking app user interfaces against app descriptions

Authors:

Konstantin Kuznetsov,

Vitalii Avdiienko,

Alessandra Gorla,

Andreas ZellerAuthors Info & Claims

WAMA 2016: Proceedings of the International Workshop on App Market Analytics

Pages 1 - 7

https://doi.org/10.1145/2993259.2993265

Published: 14 November 2016 Publication History

Get Access

Abstract

Does the advertised behavior of apps correlate with what a user sees on a screen? In this paper, we introduce a technique to statically extract the text from the user interface definitions of an Android app. We use this technique to compare the natural language topics of an app’s user interface against the topics from its app store description. A mismatch indicates that some feature is exposed by the user interface, but is not present in the description, or vice versa. The popular Twitter app, for instance, spots UI elements that al- low to make purchases; however, this feature is not mentioned in its description. Likewise, we identified a number of apps whose user interface asks users to access or supply sensitive data; but this “feature” is not mentioned in the description. In the long run, analyzing user interface topics and comparing them against external descriptions opens the way for checking general mismatches between requirements and implementation.

References

[1]

A. A. Al-Subaihin, F. Sarro, S. Black, L. Capra, M. Harman, Y. Jia, and Y. Zhang. Clustering mobile apps based on mined textual descriptions. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM), ESEM ’16, 2016.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[2]

V. Avdiienko, K. Kuznetsov, P. Calciati, J. C. C. Román, A. Gorla, and A. Zeller. CALAPPA: a toolchain for mining android applications. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on App Market Analytics, WAMA 2016, pages –. ACM, 11 2016.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[3]

A. Gorla, I. Tavecchia, F. Gross, and A. Zeller. Checking app behavior against app descriptions. In Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2014, pages 1025–1035, New York, NY, USA, 2014. ACM.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[4]

J. Huang, X. Zhang, L. Tan, P. Wang, and B. Liang. AsDroid: detecting stealthy behaviors in Android applications by user interface and program behavior contradiction. In Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2014, pages 1036–1046, New York, NY, USA, 2014. ACM.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[5]

K. Kuznetsov, A. Gorla, I. Tavecchia, F. Gross, and A. Zeller. Mining android apps for anomalies. In The Art and Science of Analyzing Software Data, pages 257–281. Morgan Kaufmann, 4 2015.

Google Scholar

[6]

R. T.-W. Lo, B. He, and I. Ounis. Automatically building a stopword list for an information retrieval system. In Information Retrieval Workshop, page 17. Citeseer, 2005.

Google Scholar

[7]

A. K. McCallum. Mallet: A machine learning for language toolkit. http://mallet.cs.umass.edu, 2002.

Google Scholar

[8]

S. Nakatani. Language detection library for Java, 2010.

Google Scholar

[9]

R. Pandita, X. Xiao, W. Yang, W. Enck, and T. Xie. WHYPER: Towards automating risk assessment of mobile applications. In USENIX Security Symposium, pages 527–542, 2013.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[10]

Z. Qu, V. Rastogi, X. Zhang, Y. Chen, T. Zhu, and Z. Chen. AutoCog: Measuring the description-to-permission fidelity in Android applications. In Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2014.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[11]

L. Yu, X. Luo, C. Qian, and S. Wang. Revisiting the description-to-behavior fidelity in android applications. In 2016 IEEE 23rd International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER), volume 1, pages 415–426, March 2016.

Crossref

Google Scholar

Cited By

View all

Alecci MSamhi JBissyande TKlein JRoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey M(2024)Revisiting Android App CategorizationProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3639094(1-12)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597503.3639094
Nurwidyantoro AShahin MChaudron MHussain WPerera HShams RWhittle J(2023)Integrating human values in software development using a human values dashboardEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-023-10305-y28:3Online publication date: 18-Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-023-10305-y
Nurwidyantoro AShahin MChaudron MHussain WPerera HShams RWhittle JLanubile F(2021)Towards a Human Values Dashboard for Software DevelopmentProceedings of the 15th ACM / IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM)10.1145/3475716.3475770(1-12)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3475716.3475770
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Checking app user interfaces against app descriptions

Recommendations

An Explorative Study of the Mobile App Ecosystem from App Developers' Perspective
WWW '17: Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web

With the prevalence of smartphones, app markets such as Apple App Store and Google Play has become the center stage in the mobile app ecosystem, with millions of apps developed by tens of thousands of app developers in each major market. This paper ...
Same app, different app stores: a comparative study
MOBILESoft '17: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems

To attract more users, implementing the same mobile app for different platforms has become a common industry practice. App stores provide a unique channel for users to share feedback on the acquired apps through ratings and textual reviews. However, ...
Inter-app communication between Android apps developed in app-inventor and Android studio
MOBILESoft '16: Proceedings of the International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems

Communications between mobile apps are an important aspect of mobile platforms. Android is specifically designed with inter-app communication in mind and depends on this to provide different platform specific functionalities. Android Apps can either be ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

WAMA 2016: Proceedings of the International Workshop on App Market Analytics

November 2016

56 pages

ISBN:9781450343985

DOI:10.1145/2993259

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 14 November 2016

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

FSE'16

Sponsor:

SIGSOFT

FSE'16: 24nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

November 14, 2016

WA, Seattle, USA

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

8
Total Citations
View Citations
457
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)14
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 21 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

Alecci MSamhi JBissyande TKlein JRoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey M(2024)Revisiting Android App CategorizationProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3639094(1-12)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597503.3639094
Nurwidyantoro AShahin MChaudron MHussain WPerera HShams RWhittle J(2023)Integrating human values in software development using a human values dashboardEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-023-10305-y28:3Online publication date: 18-Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-023-10305-y
Nurwidyantoro AShahin MChaudron MHussain WPerera HShams RWhittle JLanubile F(2021)Towards a Human Values Dashboard for Software DevelopmentProceedings of the 15th ACM / IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM)10.1145/3475716.3475770(1-12)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3475716.3475770
Feichtner JGruber S(2020)Code Between the Lines: Semantic Analysis of Android ApplicationsICT Systems Security and Privacy Protection10.1007/978-3-030-58201-2_12(171-186)Online publication date: 14-Sep-2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58201-2_12
Wang HWang XGuo Y(2019)Characterizing the Global Mobile App Developers: A Large-Scale Empirical Study2019 IEEE/ACM 6th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems (MOBILESoft)10.1109/MOBILESoft.2019.00031(150-161)Online publication date: May-2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/MOBILESoft.2019.00031
Liu YLiu LLiu HLi S(2019)Information Recommendation Based on Domain Knowledge in App Descriptions for Improving the Quality of RequirementsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2019.28915437(9501-9514)Online publication date: 2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2891543
Al-Subaihin ASarro FBlack SCapra L(2019)Empirical comparison of text-based mobile apps similarity measurement techniquesEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-019-09726-5Online publication date: 24-Jun-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-019-09726-5
Ali MJoorabchi MMesbah AGrundy JHalfond WBuhnova BAutili MMuccini H(2017)Same app, different app storesProceedings of the 4th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems10.1109/MOBILESoft.2017.3(79-90)Online publication date: 20-May-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/MOBILESoft.2017.3

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

An Explorative Study of the Mobile App Ecosystem from App Developers' Perspective

Same app, different app stores: a comparative study

Inter-app communication between Android apps developed in app-inventor and Android studio