Cross-device record and replay for Android apps

Abstract

Cross-device replay for Android apps is challenging because apps have to adapt or even restructure their GUIs responsively upon screen-size or orientation change across devices. As a first exploratory work, this paper demonstrates that cross-device record and replay can be made simple and practical by a one-pass, greedy algorithm by the Rx framework leveraging the least surprise principle in the GUI design. The experimental results of over 1,000 replay settings encouragingly show that our implemented Rx prototype tool effectively solved non-trivial cross-device replay cases beyond any known non-search-based work's scope, and had still competitive capabilities on same-device replay with start-of-the-art techniques.