A Benchmark of Data Loss Bugs for Android Apps

Abstract

Android apps must be able to deal with both stop events, which require immediately stopping the execution of the app without losing state information, and start events, which require resuming the execution of the app at the same point it was stopped. Support to these kinds of events must be explicitly implemented by developers who unfortunately often fail to implement the proper logic for saving and restoring the state of an app. As a consequence apps can lose data when moved to background and then back to foreground (e.g., to answer a call) or when the screen is simply rotated. These faults can be the cause of annoying usability issues and unexpected crashes. This paper presents a public benchmark of 110 data loss faults in Android apps that we systematically collected to facilitate research and experimentation with these problems. The benchmark is available on GitLab and includes the faulty apps, the fixed apps (when available), the test cases to automatically reproduce the problems, and additional information that may help researchers in their tasks.