ACID: An API Compatibility Issue Detector for Android Apps

Android API is frequently updated, and compatibility issues may be induced when the API level supported by the device differs from the API level targeted by app developers. This paper presents ACID, an API compatibility issue detector for Android apps. ACID utilizes API differences and static analysis of Android apps to detect both API invocation compatibility issues and API callback compatibility issues. Our evaluation on 20 benchmark apps from previous studies shows that ACID is more accurate and faster in detecting compatibility issues than state-of-the-art techniques. We also ran ACID on 35 more real-world apps to demonstrate ACID’s practical applicability. ACID is available at https://github.com/TSUMahmud/acid and the demonstration video of ACID is available at https://youtu.be/XUNBPMIx2q4.