Automatically Distilling Storyboard With Rich Features for Android Apps

Before developing a new mobile app, the development team usually endeavors painstaking efforts to review many existing apps with similar purposes. The process is crucial in sense that it reduces market risks and provides inspirations for app development. However, manual exploration of hundreds by different roles (e.g., product manager, UI/UX designer, developer, tester) can be ineffective. For example, difficult completely explore all functionalities from aspects including design, implementation, testing short period time. reverse engineering tools only provide basic features such as AndroidManifest.xml Java source files users. Following conception storyboard movie production, we propose system, named StoryDistiller, automatically generate storyboards Android rich through engineering, assist analyze effectively efficiently. Specifically, (1) hybrid method extract relatively complete Activity transition graph (ATG), is, first extracts ATG static analysis first, further leverages dynamic component augment ATG; (2) required inter-component communication (ICC) data each target leveraging data-flow renders UI pages dynamically using instrumentation together extracted ICC data; (3) obtain comprehensive rendered pages, semantic activity names, corresponding logic layout code, etc. (4) implement visualization web service features. Our experiments unveil StoryDistiller effective indeed useful review. We also conduct comparison study demonstrate better performance over IC3, Gator, Stoat, StoryDroid.