TY - GEN
T1 - Demystifying application performance management libraries for android
AU - Tang, Yutian
AU - Zhan, Xian
AU - Zhou, Hao
AU - Luo, Xiapu
AU - Xu, Zhou
AU - Zhou, Yajin
AU - Yan, Qiben
PY - 2019/11
Y1 - 2019/11
N2 - Since the performance issues of apps can influence users' experience, developers leverage application performance management (APM) tools to locate the potential performance bottleneck of their apps. Unfortunately, most developers do not understand how APMs monitor their apps during the runtime and whether these APMs have any limitations. In this paper, we demystify APMs by inspecting 25 widely-used APMs that target on Android apps. We first report how these APMs implement 8 key functions as well as their limitations. Then, we conduct a large-scale empirical study on 500,000 Android apps from Google Play to explore the usage of APMs. This study has some interesting observations about existing APMs for Android, including 1) some APMs still use deprecated permissions and approaches so that they may not always work properly; 2) some app developers use APMs to collect users' privacy information.
AB - Since the performance issues of apps can influence users' experience, developers leverage application performance management (APM) tools to locate the potential performance bottleneck of their apps. Unfortunately, most developers do not understand how APMs monitor their apps during the runtime and whether these APMs have any limitations. In this paper, we demystify APMs by inspecting 25 widely-used APMs that target on Android apps. We first report how these APMs implement 8 key functions as well as their limitations. Then, we conduct a large-scale empirical study on 500,000 Android apps from Google Play to explore the usage of APMs. This study has some interesting observations about existing APMs for Android, including 1) some APMs still use deprecated permissions and approaches so that they may not always work properly; 2) some app developers use APMs to collect users' privacy information.
KW - Android
KW - Application Performance Management Library
KW - Empirical Study
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85078888288&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ASE.2019.00069
DO - 10.1109/ASE.2019.00069
M3 - Conference article published in proceeding or book
AN - SCOPUS:85078888288
T3 - Proceedings - 2019 34th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, ASE 2019
SP - 682
EP - 685
BT - Proceedings - 2019 34th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, ASE 2019
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 34th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, ASE 2019
Y2 - 10 November 2019 through 15 November 2019
ER -