ICC-Inspect: Supporting Runtime Inspection of Android Inter-Component Communications

We present ICC-Inspect, a tool for understanding Android app behaviors exhibited at runtime via inter-component communication (ICC). Through lightweight Intent profiling, ICC-Inspect streams run-time ICC information to a dynamic visualization framework which depicts interactive ICC call graphs along with informative ICC statistics. This framework allows users to examine the details of a specific fragment of execution in the context of the holistic ICC view of an app. Through its ability to concisely map in a visual format the complex ICC mechanisms of any Android app, ICC-Inspect facilitates behavior understanding and debugging of Android programs. The open-source release, documentation, and a video demo of ICC-Inspect are available.