CheckDroid: A Tool for Automated Detection of Bad Practices in Android Applications Using Taint Analysis

Today, Android runs on more than 80% of smartphones and tablets in the market. Although a guide to good programming practices exists, it is not at all enforced by current IDEs. This work presents CheckDroid, a tool towards automatically detecting bad patterns early in the development cycle. Its originality relies on the idea of mapping bad practices into appropriate paths in the code which can be found by static taint analysis. The main benefit for developers consists in the ability to early, simply and quickly clean up the code of potential causes of runtime errors. More specific tools can be used later for deeper verification. Preliminary experimental evaluation shows that CheckDroid is able to find common bad practices incurred in by newbie Android programmers.