An Empirical Study of UI Implementations in Android Applications

Mobile app developers are able to design sophisticated user interfaces (UIs) that can improve a user's experience and contribute to an app's success. Developers invest in automated UI testing techniques, such as crawlers, to ensure that their app's UIs have a high level of quality. However, UI implementation mechanisms have changed significantly due to the availability of new APIs and mechanisms, such as fragments. In this paper, we study a large set of real-world apps to identify whether the mechanisms developers use to implement app UIs cause problems for those automated techniques. In addition, we examined the changes in these practices over time. Our results indicate that dynamic analyses face challenges in terms of completeness and changing development practices motivate the use of additional analyses, such as static analyses. We also discuss the implications of our results for current testing techniques and the design of new analyses.