ServDroid: detecting service usage inefficiencies in Android applications

Abstract

Services in Android applications are frequently-used components for performing time-consuming operations in the background. While services play a crucial role in the app performance, our study shows that service uses in practice are not as efficient as expected, e.g., they tend to cause unnecessary resource occupation and/or energy consumption. Moreover, as service usage inefficiencies do not manifest with immediate failures, e.g., app crashes, existing testing-based approaches fall short in finding them. In this paper, we identify four anti-patterns of such service usage inefficiency bugs, including premature create, late destroy, premature destroy, and service leak, and present a static analysis technique, ServDroid, to automatically and effectively detect them based on the anti-patterns. We have applied ServDroid to a large collection of popular real-world Android apps. Our results show that, surprisingly, service usage inefficiencies are prevalent and can severely impact the app performance.