GUIFetch: Supporting App Design and Development through GUI Search

A typical way to design and develop a mobile app is to sketch the graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for the different screens in the app and then create actual GUIs from these sketches. Doing so involves identifying which layouts to use, which widgets to add, and how to configure and connect the different pieces of the GUI. To help with this difficult and time-consuming task, we propose GUIFetch, a technique that takes as input the sketch for an app and leverages the growing number of open source apps in public repositories to identify apps with GUIs and transitions that are similar to those in the provided sketch. GUIFetch first searches public repositories to find potential apps using keyword matching. It then builds models of the identified apps' screens and screen transitions using a combination of static and dynamic analyses and computes a similarity metric between the models and the provided sketch. Finally, GUIFetch ranks the identified apps (or parts thereof) based on their computed similarity value and produces a visual ranking of the results together with the code of the corresponding apps. We implemented GUIFetch for Android apps and evaluated it through user studies involving different types of apps.