Behavior-based portability analysis methodology for Android applications

Abstract

As Android is an open-source operating system, numerous device-specific updates are frequently published by various developers. Thus, in order to increase the portability of an application, the development of an Android application requires an efficient porting process. However, many analytical time-consuming problems arise when developers convert the application for other versions of platform. In this paper, we propose a behavior-based portability analysis methodology for Android applications. Using this methodology, a developer can extract the ideal behavior of an application and use it to compare the similarity of application flows. We study Android applications to determine whether the proposed methodology can be adopted to detect potential errors. The principal contribution of this paper is to enable developers to use behavior-based analysis for detecting potential errors related to portability by utilizing the porting process easily and quickly.