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A Lightweight Framework for Fine-Grained Lifecycle Control of Android Applications

Authors:

Z. Morley MaoAuthors Info & Claims

EuroSys '19: Proceedings of the Fourteenth EuroSys Conference 2019

Article No.: 31, Pages 1 - 14

https://doi.org/10.1145/3302424.3303956

Published: 25 March 2019 Publication History

Abstract

The lifecycle of Android apps is dynamically managed by the system in an ad hoc manner, which leads to apps' abusing lifecycle entry points to automatically start up and gaming the priority-based memory management mechanism to evade being killed. Such apps exhibit diehard behaviors that keep them long-running in the background, resulting in excessive battery consumption and device performance degradation. Existing battery-saving features are far from being effective in restricting diehard behaviors, due to the lack of systematic, fine-grained control of app lifecycle.

In this paper, we propose the Application Lifecycle Graph (ALG), a holistic modeling of system-wide app lifecycle. We present a lightweight runtime framework that builds ALG and utilizes it to realize fine-grained lifecycle control of apps. The framework exposes APIs that provide ALG information and lifecycle control capabilities to developers and device vendors, empowering them to leverage the framework to implement rich functionalities. Evaluation results show that the proposed framework is competent and incurs low performance overhead. It introduces 4.5MB additional memory usage on average, and approximately 5% and 0.2% CPU usage during system booting and at idle state.

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Cited By

Lin HQiu JWang HLi ZGong LGao DLiu YQian FZhang ZYang PXu TCosta XAl Hassanieh HAsadi ACox LPerino DWidmer JGiustiniano D(2023)Virtual Device Farms for Mobile App Testing at Scale: A Pursuit for Fidelity, Efficiency, and AccessibilityProceedings of the 29th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3570361.3613259(1-17)Online publication date: 2-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3570361.3613259
Hanna CPetke J(2023)Hot Patching Hot Fixes: Reflection and Perspectives2023 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)10.1109/ASE56229.2023.00021(1781-1786)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ASE56229.2023.00021
Anwar HFatima IPfahl DQamar U(2021)Tool Support for Green Android DevelopmentSoftware Sustainability10.1007/978-3-030-69970-3_7(153-182)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69970-3_7
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

A Lightweight Framework for Fine-Grained Lifecycle Control of Android Applications
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software organization and properties

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

EuroSys '19: Proceedings of the Fourteenth EuroSys Conference 2019

March 2019

714 pages

ISBN:9781450362818

DOI:10.1145/3302424

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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Publication History

Published: 25 March 2019

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EuroSys '19

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EuroSys '19: Fourteenth EuroSys Conference 2019

March 25 - 28, 2019

Dresden, Germany

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Overall Acceptance Rate 241 of 1,308 submissions, 18%

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Twentieth European Conference on Computer Systems

March 30 - April 3, 2025

Rotterdam , Netherlands

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Cited By

Lin HQiu JWang HLi ZGong LGao DLiu YQian FZhang ZYang PXu TCosta XAl Hassanieh HAsadi ACox LPerino DWidmer JGiustiniano D(2023)Virtual Device Farms for Mobile App Testing at Scale: A Pursuit for Fidelity, Efficiency, and AccessibilityProceedings of the 29th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3570361.3613259(1-17)Online publication date: 2-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3570361.3613259
Hanna CPetke J(2023)Hot Patching Hot Fixes: Reflection and Perspectives2023 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)10.1109/ASE56229.2023.00021(1781-1786)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ASE56229.2023.00021
Anwar HFatima IPfahl DQamar U(2021)Tool Support for Green Android DevelopmentSoftware Sustainability10.1007/978-3-030-69970-3_7(153-182)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69970-3_7
Ghanem TZein S(2020)A Model-based approach to assist Android Activity Lifecycle Development2020 4th International Symposium on Multidisciplinary Studies and Innovative Technologies (ISMSIT)10.1109/ISMSIT50672.2020.9254687(1-12)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/ISMSIT50672.2020.9254687

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