Proactive Libraries: Enforcing Correct Behaviors in Android Apps
This addresses API misuse issues for Android app developers, offering a runtime solution that is incremental in improving app correctness.
The paper tackles the problem of Android developers incorrectly using APIs due to rapid evolution and component lifecycle complexities, presenting Proactive Libraries, a tool that detects and heals API misuses at runtime with negligible overhead, as shown in an evaluation with 27 possible misuses.
The Android framework provides a rich set of APIs that can be exploited by developers to build their apps. However, the rapid evolution of these APIs jointly with the specific characteristics of the lifecycle of the Android components challenge developers, who may release apps that use APIs incorrectly. In this demo, we present Proactive Libraries, a tool that can be used to decorate regular libraries with the capability of proactively detecting and healing API misuses at runtime. Proactive Libraries blend libraries with multiple proactive modules that collect data, check the compliance of API usages with correctness policies, and heal executions as soon as the possible violation of a policy is detected. The results of our evaluation with 27 possible API misuses show the effectiveness of Proactive Libraries in correcting API misuses with negligible runtime overhead.