Roaming Through the Castle Tunnels: An Empirical Analysis of Inter-app Navigation of Android Apps

AbstractSmartphone applications (a.k.a., apps) have become indispensable in our everyday life and work. In practice, accomplishing a task on smartphones may require the user to navigate among various apps. Unlike Web pages that are inherently interconnected through hyperlinks, apps are usually isolated building blocks, and the lack of direct links between apps has compromised the efficiency of task completion and user experience. In this article, we present the first in-depth empirical study of page-level access behaviors of smartphone users based on a comprehensive dataset collected through an extensive user study. We propose a model to distinguish informational pages and transitional pages, based on which we can extract page-level inter-app navigation. Surprisingly, the transitional pages account for quite substantial time cost and manual actions when navigating from the current informational page to the desirable informational page. We reveal that developing “tunnels” between “isolated” apps under specific usage scenarios has a huge potential to reduce the cost of navigation. Our analysis provides some practical implications on how to improve app-navigation experience from both the operating system’s perspective and the developer’s perspective.