Relda2: An effective static analysis tool for resource leak detection in Android apps

Resource leak is a common bug in Android applications (apps for short). In general, it is caused by missing release operations of the resources provided by Android (like Camera, Media Player and Sensors) that require programmers to explicitly release them. It might lead to several serious problems for the app and system, such as performance degradation and system crash. This paper presents Relda2, a light-weight, scalable and practical static analysis tool, for detecting resource leaks in the byte-code of Android apps automatically. It supports two analysis techniques (flow-insensitive for quick scanning and flow-sensitive for accurate scanning), and performs inter-procedural analysis to get more precise bug reports. In addition, our tool is practical to analyze real-world apps, and has been applied to 103 Android apps, including industry applications and open source programs. We have found 67 real resource leaks in these apps, which we confirmed manually. A demo video of our tool can be found at the website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mk-MFcHpTds.