Automated testing to detect status data loss in android applications
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Abstract
Mobile applications are increasing in a significant amount, each to address the requirements of many users. However, the quick developments and enhancements are resulting in many underlying defects. When user installs an app, it is expected that the data should be persistent at all states, which requires saving the instance data for all the activities. An app can be paused or sent to the background due to other interruptions or user intervention. It is difficult for the programmer to test this issue for all the activities. This results the issue of data loss, the information/details entered by user in the app are not saved when there is any interruption. This results in degrading the user experience because user should enter the information each time there is an interruption. There are several static analysis tools to test this issue. Thus, the automated testing to detect such data loss is important to improve the user experience. This research proposes a tool, DroidDLP, a Data Loss Preventor in Android, which will detect the information loss from a given android application. We have tested 395 applications and found 12 applications with the issue of data loss. This approach is proved highly accurate and reliable to find the apps with this defect, which can be used by android developers to avoid such errors.

