Characterizing Android-Specific Crash Bugs

Android platform provides a unique framework for app development. Failure to comply with the framework may result in serious bugs. Android platform is also evolving rapidly and developers extensively use APIs provided by the framework, which may lead to serious compatibility bugs if developers do not update the released apps frequently. Furthermore, Android apps run on a wide range of memory-constrained devices, which may cause various device-specific and memory-related bugs. There are several other Android-specific issues that developers need to address during app development and maintenance. Failure to address the issues may result in serious bugs manifested as crashes. In this paper, we perform an empirical study to investigate and characterize various Android-specific crash bugs, their prevalence, root causes, and solutions by analyzing 1,862 confirmed crash reports of 418 open source Android apps. The investigation results can help app developers in understanding, preventing, and fixing the Android-specific crash bugs. Moreover, the results can help app developers and researchers in designing effective bug detection tools for Android apps.