Enhancing Automated GUI Exploration Techniques for Android Mobile Applications

Mobile software applications ("apps") are used by billions of smartphone owners worldwide. The demand for quality to these apps has grown together with their spread. Therefore, effective techniques and tools are being requested to support developers in mobile app quality engineering activities. Automation tools can facilitate these activities since they can save humans from routine, time consuming and error prone manual tasks. Automated GUI exploration techniques are widely adopted by researchers and practitioners in the context of mobile apps for supporting critical engineering tasks such as reverse engineering, testing, and network traffic signature generation. These techniques iteratively exercise a running app by exploiting the information that the app exposes at runtime through its GUI to derive the set of input events to be fired. Although several automated GUI exploration techniques have been proposed in the literature, they suffer from some limitations that may hinder them from a thorough app exploration. This dissertation proposes two novel solutions that contribute to the literature in Software Engineering towards improving existing automated GUI exploration techniques for mobile software applications. The former is a fully automated GUI exploration technique that aims to detect issues tied to the app instances lifecycle, a mobile-specific feature that allows users to smoothly navigate through an app and switch between apps. In particular, this technique addresses the issues of crashes and GUI failures, that consists in the manifestation of unexpected GUI states. This work includes two exploratory studies that prove that GUI failures are a widespread problem in the context of mobile apps. The latter solution is a hybrid exploration technique that combines automated GUI exploration with capture and replay through machine learning. It exploits app-specific knowledge that only human users can provide in order to explore relevant parts of the application that can be reached only by firing complex sequences of input events on specific GUIs and by choosing specific input values. Both the techniques have been implemented in tools that target the Android Operating System, that is today the world’s most popular mobile operating system. The effectiveness of the proposed techniques is demonstrated through experimental evaluations performed on real mobile apps

Evaluating accredited mHealth applications. An exploratory study

[EN] Standards and validation practices regarding mobile health apps need to be established to ensure their proper use and integration into medical practice. This preliminary study aims to conduct a comparative analysis of the entire apps that have been awarded by a Quality Seal to identify significant differences according to the variables analyzed (user, developer, category and consumer ratings) and identified quality attributes. Although the applications analysed are characterised by their heterogeneity, this research found that seven out of 50 remarkable attributes had significant influence on the application evaluation process, according to the recommendations on design, use and assessment of health from AppSaludable. Only some attributes (adaptation of contents, pilot testing, and accessibility and usability) were correlated with some apps’ features. This study can contribute to improving both the processes of validation and quality of medical care of the citizens and in general, the medical practiceGessa, A.; Jiménez, A.; Sancha, P. (2020). Evaluating accredited mHealth applications. An exploratory study. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/CARMA2020.2020.11609OCS12313

User interface design for mobile-based sexual health interventions for young people: Design recommendations from a qualitative study on an online Chlamydia clinical care pathway

Background: The increasing pervasiveness of mobile technologies has given potential to transform healthcare by facilitating clinical management using software applications. These technologies may provide valuable tools in sexual health care and potentially overcome existing practical and cultural barriers to routine testing for sexually transmitted infections. In order to inform the design of a mobile health application for STIs that supports self-testing and self-management by linking diagnosis with online care pathways, we aimed to identify the dimensions and range of preferences for user interface design features among young people. Methods: Nine focus group discussions were conducted (n=49) with two age-stratified samples (16 to 18 and 19 to 24 year olds) of young people from Further Education colleges and Higher Education establishments. Discussions explored young people's views with regard to: the software interface; the presentation of information; and the ordering of interaction steps. Discussions were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. Interview transcripts were analysed using thematic analysis. Results: Four over-arching themes emerged: privacy and security; credibility; user journey support; and the task-technology-context fit. From these themes, 20 user interface design recommendations for mobile health applications are proposed. For participants, although privacy was a major concern, security was not perceived as a major potential barrier as participants were generally unaware of potential security threats and inherently trusted new technology. Customisation also emerged as a key design preference to increase attractiveness and acceptability. Conclusions: Considerable effort should be focused on designing healthcare applications from the patient's perspective to maximise acceptability. The design recommendations proposed in this paper provide a valuable point of reference for the health design community to inform development of mobile-based health interventions for the diagnosis and treatment of a number of other conditions for this target group, while stimulating conversation across multidisciplinary communities

FraudDroid: Automated Ad Fraud Detection for Android Apps

Although mobile ad frauds have been widespread, state-of-the-art approaches in the literature have mainly focused on detecting the so-called static placement frauds, where only a single UI state is involved and can be identified based on static information such as the size or location of ad views. Other types of fraud exist that involve multiple UI states and are performed dynamically while users interact with the app. Such dynamic interaction frauds, although now widely spread in apps, have not yet been explored nor addressed in the literature. In this work, we investigate a wide range of mobile ad frauds to provide a comprehensive taxonomy to the research community. We then propose, FraudDroid, a novel hybrid approach to detect ad frauds in mobile Android apps. FraudDroid analyses apps dynamically to build UI state transition graphs and collects their associated runtime network traffics, which are then leveraged to check against a set of heuristic-based rules for identifying ad fraudulent behaviours. We show empirically that FraudDroid detects ad frauds with a high precision (93%) and recall (92%). Experimental results further show that FraudDroid is capable of detecting ad frauds across the spectrum of fraud types. By analysing 12,000 ad-supported Android apps, FraudDroid identified 335 cases of fraud associated with 20 ad networks that are further confirmed to be true positive results and are shared with our fellow researchers to promote advanced ad fraud detectionComment: 12 pages, 10 figure

Branded apps in Spain as a means of communicating trends in fashion

Apps are of great interest and curiosity for the users of mobile phones, being already highly unloaded and used for the users of smartphones. The fashion mobile applications represent only a fraction of the mobile global applications (almost 0,2 %), nevertheless they are starting to deserve special attention from designers and researchers in this area. Brands want to know about the new trends in the market to be able to continue surprising and impressing their public. In this study, we seek to identify the most relevant aspects of the applications that help to improve the image of the Spanish prêt-à-porter fashion brands such as Zara, Pull and Bear, Stradivarius, Shana, Bimba y Lola,... The study considers the position in the ranking of downloads, the category, the opinions, valuations of the users and the criteria described by Jami Lawrence (2010): amusement, saving of time and / or comfort in the use. Findings: In this analysis, we seek to identify the most relevant aspects of the applications that help to improve the image of the brand, in this particular case of the Spanish prêt-à-porter fashion brands. - It is indispensable that the applications entertain the user, save time and / or comfort, we have observed that they are these characteristics those that are valued by the users. - Another factor that is valued in the applications, is that the application should make sense for the user and to have an added value that doesn't necessarily have to be related with the nature of the brand. - But it is important that applications to be developed have to be coherent with the identity of the brand. As in any other area, the appearance of new mass media, like the mobile, is the introduction of new challenges. – Finally, it is important for the brand to adapt constantly to the new technologies, but we must not forget that a precarious incorporation and badly developed app it can be more harmful than beneficial

Evaluation of mobile health education applications for health professionals and patients

Paper presented at 8th International conference on e-Health (EH 2016), 1-3 July 2016, Funchal, Madeira, Portugal. ABSTRACT Mobile applications for health education are commonly utilized to support patients and health professionals. A critical evaluation framework is required to ensure the usability and reliability of mobile health education applications in order to facilitate the saving of time and effort for the various user groups; thus, the aim of this paper is to describe a framework for evaluating mobile applications for health education. The intended outcome of this framework is to meet the needs and requirements of the different user categories and to improve the development of mobile health education applications with software engineering approaches, by creating new and more effective techniques to evaluate such software. This paper first highlights the importance of mobile health education apps, then explains the need to establish an evaluation framework for these apps. The paper provides a description of the evaluation framework, along with some specific evaluation metrics: an efficient hybrid of selected heuristic evaluation (HE) and usability evaluation (UE) factors to enable the determination of the usefulness and usability of health education mobile apps. Finally, an explanation of the initial results for the framework was obtained using a Medscape mobile app. The proposed framework - An Evaluation Framework for Mobile Health Education Apps – is a hybrid of five metrics selected from a larger set in heuristic and usability evaluation, filtered based on interviews from patients and health professionals. These five metrics correspond to specific facets of usability identified through a requirements analysis of typical users of mobile health apps. These metrics were decomposed into 21 specific questionnaire questions, which are available on request from first author

Are HIV smartphone apps and online interventions fit for purpose?

Sexual health is an under-explored area of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), particularly sexually transmitted infections such as HIV. Due to the stigma associated with these infections, people are often motivated to seek information online. With the rise of smartphone and web apps, there is enormous potential for technology to provide easily accessible information and resources. However, using online information raises important concerns about the trustworthiness of these resources and whether they are fit for purpose. We conducted a review of smartphone and web apps to investigate the landscape of currently available online apps and whether they meet the diverse needs of people seeking information on HIV online. Our functionality review revealed that existing technology interventions have a one-size-fits-all approach and do not support the breadth and complexity of HIV-related support needs. We argue that technology-based interventions need to signpost their offering and provide tailored support for different stages of HIV, including prevention, testing, diagnosis and management