Detecting Potential User-data Save & Export Losses due to Android App Termination

Abstract

A common feature in Android apps is saving, or exporting, user’s work (e.g., a drawing) as well as data (e.g., a spreadsheet) onto local storage, as a file. Due to the volatile nature of the OS and the mobile environment in general, the system can terminate apps without notice, which prevents the execution of file write operations; consequently, user data that was supposed to be saved/exported is instead lost. Testing apps for such potential losses raises several challenges: how to identify data originating from user input or resulting from user action (then check whether it is saved), and how to reproduce a potential error by terminating the app at the exact moment when unsaved changes are pending. We address these challenges via an approach that finds potential “lost writes”, i.e., user data supposed to be written to a file, but the file write does not take place due to system-initiated termination. Our approach consists of two phases: a static analysis that finds potential losses and a dynamic loss verification phase where we compare lossy and lossless system-level file write traces to confirm errors. We ran our analysis on 2,182 apps from Google Play and 38 apps from F-Droid. Our approach found 163 apps where termination caused losses, including losing user’s app-specific data, notes, photos, user’s work and settings. In contrast, two state-of-the-art tools aimed at finding volatility errors in Android apps failed to discover the issues we found.