research-article

Better Android apps using Android vitals

Authors:

Matthias MüllerAuthors Info & Claims

WAMA 2019: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGSOFT International Workshop on App Market Analytics

Pages 26 - 32

https://doi.org/10.1145/3340496.3342761

Published: 27 August 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Google provides Android Vitals, a set of reports and tools for Android Developers as part of Google Play Console. Android Vitals can help developers improve their Android apps after an app has been launched by providing information on how their app is performing in key areas such as battery use, performance, and stability (freezes and crashes). Android Vitals also provides various comparisons, including against global bad behavior thresholds, against various peer groups of apps, and across releases of this app.

Developers confirm Android Vitals notifies them of relevant problems and they found it valuable even if they also use crash reporting and mobile analytics.

The underlying data is used by Google to assess the relative quality of Android apps; and the perceived quality may materially affect the visibility of an app in the Google Play Store. Yet little is known about the tools.

This paper outlines various experiences from the developers' perspective of using Android Vitals with several popular Android apps to help open discussions and suggest further research areas. It introduces an open source project, created as part of our work, that enables developers to download pertinent data, particularly crash reports. The data can be analysed both by the development team and others. A particular benefit of this tool is to make the data available outside of the Google platform, which allows developers and (indirectly) researchers to develop additional analysis techniques not currently provided by the platform.

References

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AppBrain. 2019. Android app download statistics on Google Play. https://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/tag/crash-reporting/androidcrash-reporting-libraries

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AppBrain. 2019. Android app download statistics on Google Play. https: //www.appbrain.com/stats/android-app-downloads Better Android Apps using Android Vitals WAMA ’19, August 27, 2019, Tallinn, Estonia

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Google. 2019. View crashes & application not responding (ANR) errors. Retrieved June 11, 2019 from https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/ answer/6083203

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Giovanni Grano, Adelina Ciurumelea, Sebastiano Panichella, Fabio Palomba, and Harald C Gall. 2018. Exploring the integration of user feedback in automated testing of android applications. In 2018 IEEE 25th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER). IEEE, 72–83.

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Mark Harman, Afnan Al-Subaihin, Yue Jia, William Martin, Federica Sarro, and Yuanyuan Zhang. 2016. Mobile App and App Store Analysis, Testing, and Optimisation. In 2016 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems (MOBILESoft). IEEE, 243–244.

Digital Library

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Julian Harty. 2019. Google Play Console: Insightful Development using Android Vitals and Pre-Launch Reports. In 2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems (MOBILESoft). IEEE. http://oro.open.ac. uk/61066/

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Wei Jin and Alessandro Orso. 2012. BugRedux: reproducing field failures for in-house debugging. In 2012 34th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). IEEE, 474–484.

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Pingfan Kong, Li Li, Jun Gao, Kui Liu, Tegawendé F Bissyandé, and Jacques Klein. 2018. Automated testing of android apps: A systematic literature review. IEEE Transactions on Reliability 99 (2018), 1–22.

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Ke Mao, Mark Harman, and Yue Jia. 2016. Sapienz: Multi-objective automated testing for Android applications. In Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis. ACM, 94–105.

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William Martin, Federica Sarro, Yue Jia, Yuanyuan Zhang, and Mark Harman. 2016. A survey of app store analysis for software engineering. IEEE transactions on software engineering 43, 9 (2016), 817–847.

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Matthias Müller, Christian Schindler, and Wolfgang Slany. 2019. Engaging Students in Open Source: Establishing FOSS Development at a University. In Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. 7721–7730.

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Stéphane Nicolas. 2018. README for RoboSpice. Retrieved June 12, 2019 from https://github.com/stephanenicolas/robospice/blob/release/README.md

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Lucas Pelloni, Giovanni Grano, Adelina Ciurumelea, Sebastiano Panichella, Fabio Palomba, and Harald C Gall. 2018. Becloma: Augmenting stack traces with user review information. In 2018 IEEE 25th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER). IEEE, 522–526.

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Joseph Reeve and Julian Harty. 2019. commercetest/vitals-scraper. Retrieved July 01, 2019 from https://github.com/commercetest/vitals-scraper

Cited By

Harty JBandara A(2024)Taming App Reliability: Mobile Analytics “in the wild”Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/3661167.3661169(450-453)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3661167.3661169
Gong LLin HLiu DYang LWang HQiu JLi ZQian F(2024)Who Should We Blame for Android App Crashes? An In-Depth Study at Scale and Practical ResolutionsACM Transactions on Sensor Networks10.1145/364989520:3(1-24)Online publication date: 13-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649895
Hort MKechagia MSarro FHarman M(2022)A Survey of Performance Optimization for Mobile ApplicationsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2021.307119348:8(2879-2904)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2021.3071193
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Better Android apps using Android vitals
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Empirical software validation
      2. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. Development frameworks and environments
      1. Application specific development environments

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

WAMA 2019: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGSOFT International Workshop on App Market Analytics

August 2019

46 pages

ISBN:9781450368582

DOI:10.1145/3340496

General Chairs:
Federica Sarro,
Maleknaz Nayebi

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 27 August 2019

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ESEC/FSE '19

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ESEC/FSE '19: 27th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

August 27, 2019

Tallinn, Estonia

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Cited By

Harty JBandara A(2024)Taming App Reliability: Mobile Analytics “in the wild”Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/3661167.3661169(450-453)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3661167.3661169
Gong LLin HLiu DYang LWang HQiu JLi ZQian F(2024)Who Should We Blame for Android App Crashes? An In-Depth Study at Scale and Practical ResolutionsACM Transactions on Sensor Networks10.1145/364989520:3(1-24)Online publication date: 13-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649895
Hort MKechagia MSarro FHarman M(2022)A Survey of Performance Optimization for Mobile ApplicationsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2021.307119348:8(2879-2904)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2021.3071193
Wimalasooriya CLicorish SCosta DMacDonell S(2022)A systematic mapping study addressing the reliability of mobile applicationsJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2021.111166186:COnline publication date: 9-May-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jss.2021.111166
Harty J(2020)How Can Software Testing be Improved by Analytics to Deliver Better Apps?2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops (ICSTW)10.1109/ICSTW50294.2020.00072(408-410)Online publication date: Oct-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSTW50294.2020.00072
Harty J(2020)How Can Software Testing be Improved by Analytics to Deliver Better Apps?2020 IEEE 13th International Conference on Software Testing, Validation and Verification (ICST)10.1109/ICST46399.2020.00052(418-420)Online publication date: Oct-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICST46399.2020.00052

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