Analyses for specific defects in android applications: a survey

Android applications (APPS) are in widespread use and have enriched our life. To ensure the quality and security of the apps, many approaches have been proposed in recent years for detecting bugs and defects in the apps, of which program analysis is a major one. This paper mainly makes an investigation of existing works on the analysis of Android apps. We summarize the purposes and proposed techniques of existing approaches, and make a taxonomy of these works, based on which we point out the trends and challenges of research in this field. From our survey, we sum up four main findings: (1) program analysis in Android security field has gained particular attention in the past years, the fields of functionality and performance should also gain proper attention; the infrastructure that supports detection of various defects should be enriched to meet the industry’s need; (2) many kinds of defects result from developers’ misunderstanding or misuse of the characteristics and mechanisms in Android system, thus the works that can systematically collect and formalize Android recommendations are in demand; (3) various program analysis approaches with techniques in other fields are applied in analyzing Android apps; however, they can be improved with more precise techniques to be more applicable; (4) The fragmentation and evolution of Android system blocks the usability of existing tools, which should be taken into consideration when developing new approaches.