Push-Button Synthesis of Watch Companions for Android Apps

Abstract

Most Android apps lack their counterparts on convenient smart-watch devices, possibly due to non-trivial engineering efforts required in the new app design and code development. Inspired by the observation that widgets on a smartphone can be mirrored to a smartwatch, this paper presents the Jigsaw framework to greatly alleviate such engineering efforts. Particularly, Jigsaw enables a push-button development of smartphone's companion watch apps by leveraging the programming by example paradigm, version space algebra, and constraint solving. Our experiments on 16 popular open-source apps validated the effectiveness of our synthesis algorithm, as well as their practical usefulness in synthesizing usable watch companions.