Characterizing the Exception Handling Code of Android Apps

Abstract

Android apps are becoming more and more popular. The number of such apps is astonishingly increasing in a daily rate, as well as the number of users affected by their crashes. Android apps as other Java apps may crash due to faults on the exception handling (EH) code (e.g. uncaught exceptions). Techniques for exception detection and handling are not an optional add-on but a fundamental part of such apps. Yet, no study has investigated the main characteristics of the EH code of mobile apps nor the developers perspective about the good and bad practices of EH in such context. This paper reports two complementary studies: one that inspected the EH code of 15 popular Android apps (which overall comprises of 3490 try-catch-finally blocks); and other study which surveyed 47 Android experts to get their opinion about the good and bad practices of EH development in Android environment. Some outcomes of the studies shows a high occurrence of exception swallowing and only few apps sending exception information to a remote server - both considered by Android experts as bad practices that negatively impact the app robustness.