Poster: Efficient and Deterministic Replay for Web-Enabled Android Apps

Mobile apps are adopting web techniques for improved development agility. In this paper, we propose TimelyRep to help mobile developers debug and test their web-enabled Android apps. TimelyRep provides efficient deterministic record-and-replay as a software library, running on unmodified Android. Also, as touchscreen becomes the major interaction method for mobile devices, web-enabled apps can receive many events in short periods. TimelyRep embodies a mechanism to control replay delays and achieve smooth replay. TimelyRep also supports cross-device replay where the event trace captured on one device can be replayed on another. We evaluate TimelyRep with real-world web applications. The results show that TimelyRep is useful for reproducing program bugs and has higher timing precision than previous tools.