Are Your Android App Analyzers Still Relevant?

Abstract

The diversity of mobile devices on the market fostered the emergence of cross-platform frameworks, the adoption of which can simplify the development and deployment of mobile applications on multiple platforms at once. Meanwhile, this trend also challenges the state-of-the-arts static program analysis techniques in terms of analyzing Android apps with soundness and completeness. To investigate the impact of cross-platform frameworks on static analyzers, we surveyed seven of the most popular cross-platform frameworks and proposed a tool in detecting the adoption of cross-platform frameworks. We also explored the prevalence of cross-platform frameworks in the most popular one hundred apps from Google Play and Tencent App Store. In addition, by investigating the cross-platform code and their location, we find that the state-of-the-arts Android static analyzers fail to analyze the cross-platform applications mainly because they lack the capability of handling Dart and JavaScript. Show more