APPCOMMUNE: Automated Third-Party Libraries De-duplicating and Updating for Android Apps

The increasing usage of third-party libraries in Android apps is double-edged, boosting the development but introducing extra code base and potential vulnerabilities. Unlike desktop operating systems, Android does not support the sharing of third-party libraries between different apps. Thus both the de-duplicating and the updating of those libraries are difficult to be managed in a unified way. In this paper, we propose a third-party library sharing method to address the issues of code bloating and obsolete code updating. Our approach separates all integrated third-party libraries from app code and makes them still accessible through a dynamic loading mechanism. The separated libraries are managed centrally and can be shared by different apps. This not only saves the storage but also guarantees a prompt update of outdated libraries for every app. We implement APPCOMMUNE, a novel app installation and execution infrastructure to support the proposed third-party library sharing without modifying the commodity Android system. Our experiments with 212 popular third-party libraries and 502 real-world Android apps demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency: all apps work stably with our library sharing model, and 11.1% storage and bandwidth are saved for app downloading and installation. In addition, APPCOMMUNE updates 86.4% of the managed third-party libraries (with 44.6% to the latest versions).