Spotting Setting-Related UI Display Bugs in Android Apps

IF 6 1区计算机科学 Q1 COMPUTER SCIENCE, SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering Pub Date : 2026-10-01 Epub Date: 2026-07-03 DOI:10.1109/TSE.2026.3709984

Huaxun Huang;Wu Liu;Jiahao Gu;Rongxin Wu

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Android provides a wide range of system settings that allow users to control the runtime behaviors of apps, such as screen rotation and UI display. However, setting-related bugs occur when developers do not fully align their apps with the extensive range of system settings that users can define. These bugs can commonly affect apps’ UI, causing setting-related UI display (SUD) bugs that negatively impact user experience. While existing research has explored automated detection of SUD bugs, these approaches often suffer from false negatives. This limitation stems from an incomplete understanding of how app components should adapt UI elements to diverse system settings. To address this gap, we conducted an empirical study to identify common patterns of unexpected setting adaptations that result in SUD bugs. These patterns then served as the test oracle for our proposed automated tool, SUDFinder. To ensure the test coverage, SUDFinder injects a test activity to visually render the XML configuration files of each UI page. We evaluated SUDFinder on 29 popular, open-source apps on F-Droid and found that it effectively identifies 98 previously unknown SUD bugs, achieving a precision of 0.76. So far, 67 have been confirmed and 37 have been fixed by the app developers.

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发现Android应用程序中设置相关的UI显示错误

Android提供了广泛的系统设置，允许用户控制应用程序的运行时行为，如屏幕旋转和UI显示。然而，当开发人员没有将他们的应用程序与用户可以定义的广泛的系统设置完全对齐时，就会发生与设置相关的错误。这些漏洞通常会影响应用程序的UI，导致与设置相关的UI显示（SUD）漏洞，从而对用户体验产生负面影响。虽然现有的研究已经探索了SUD bug的自动检测，但这些方法经常会出现假阴性。这种限制源于对应用组件应该如何使UI元素适应不同系统设置的不完全理解。为了解决这一差距，我们进行了一项实证研究，以确定导致SUD错误的意外环境适应的常见模式。然后，这些模式作为我们提议的自动化工具SUDFinder的测试oracle。为了确保测试覆盖率，SUDFinder注入了一个测试活动来可视化地呈现每个UI页面的XML配置文件。我们对F-Droid上29个流行的开源应用程序的SUDFinder进行了评估，发现它有效地识别了98个以前未知的SUD错误，精度达到0.76。到目前为止，已有67个问题得到确认，37个已被应用程序开发人员修复。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 工程技术-工程：电子与电气

CiteScore

9.70

自引率

10.80%

发文量

724

审稿时长

6 months

期刊介绍： IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering seeks contributions comprising well-defined theoretical results and empirical studies with potential impacts on software construction, analysis, or management. The scope of this Transactions extends from fundamental mechanisms to the development of principles and their application in specific environments. Specific topic areas include: a) Development and maintenance methods and models: Techniques and principles for specifying, designing, and implementing software systems, encompassing notations and process models. b) Assessment methods: Software tests, validation, reliability models, test and diagnosis procedures, software redundancy, design for error control, and measurements and evaluation of process and product aspects. c) Software project management: Productivity factors, cost models, schedule and organizational issues, and standards. d) Tools and environments: Specific tools, integrated tool environments, associated architectures, databases, and parallel and distributed processing issues. e) System issues: Hardware-software trade-offs. f) State-of-the-art surveys: Syntheses and comprehensive reviews of the historical development within specific areas of interest.