Cited By
View all- Liu YMa YXiao XXie TLiu X(2023)LegoDroid: flexible Android app decomposition and instant installationScience China Information Sciences10.1007/s11432-021-3528-766:4Online publication date: 27-Mar-2023
Roaming Through the Castle Tunnels: An Empirical Analysis of Inter-app Navigation of Android Apps
Authors: 
Yun Ma, Ziniu Hu, Diandian Gu, Li Zhou, Qiaozhu Mei, Gang Huang, 
Xuanzhe LiuAuthors Info & Claims
Yun Ma, Ziniu Hu, Diandian Gu, Li Zhou, Qiaozhu Mei, Gang Huang, Xuanzhe LiuAuthors Info & ClaimsArticle No.: 14, Pages 1 - 24
Abstract
Smartphone applications (a.k.a., apps) have become indispensable in our everyday life and work. In practice, accomplishing a task on smartphones may require the user to navigate among various apps. Unlike Web pages that are inherently interconnected through hyperlinks, apps are usually isolated building blocks, and the lack of direct links between apps has compromised the efficiency of task completion and user experience. In this article, we present the first in-depth empirical study of page-level access behaviors of smartphone users based on a comprehensive dataset collected through an extensive user study. We propose a model to distinguish informational pages and transitional pages, based on which we can extract page-level inter-app navigation. Surprisingly, the transitional pages account for quite substantial time cost and manual actions when navigating from the current informational page to the desirable informational page. We reveal that developing “tunnels” between “isolated” apps under specific usage scenarios has a huge potential to reduce the cost of navigation. Our analysis provides some practical implications on how to improve app-navigation experience from both the operating system’s perspective and the developer’s<?brk?> perspective.
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- Roaming Through the Castle Tunnels: An Empirical Analysis of Inter-app Navigation of Android Apps
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Publication History
Published: 27 June 2020
Online AM: 07 May 2020
Accepted: 01 April 2020
Revised: 01 January 2020
Received: 01 September 2018
Published in TWEB Volume 14, Issue 3
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- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- National Key R8D Program of China
- Key Laboratory of Intelligent Application Technology
- Beijing Outstanding Young Scientist Program
- National Science Foundation
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View all- Liu YMa YXiao XXie TLiu X(2023)LegoDroid: flexible Android app decomposition and instant installationScience China Information Sciences10.1007/s11432-021-3528-766:4Online publication date: 27-Mar-2023
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