TY - GEN
T1 - Aladdin
T2 - 27th International World Wide Web, WWW 2018
AU - Ma, Yun
AU - Hu, Ziniu
AU - Liu, Yunxin
AU - Xie, Tao
AU - Liu, Xuanzhe
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program under the grant numbers 2016YFB1000105 and 2017YFB1003000, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant numbers 61725201, 61528201, 61529201, and in part by National Science Foundation under grants no. CCF-1409423, CNS-1513939, CNS-1564274. Xuanzhe Liu is the corresponding author of this paper.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 IW3C2 (International World Wide Web Conference Committee), published under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 License.
PY - 2018/4/10
Y1 - 2018/4/10
N2 - Compared to the Web where each web page has a global URL for external access, a specific 'page' inside a mobile app cannot be easily accessed unless the user performs several steps from the landing page of this app. Recently, the concept of 'deep link' is expected to be a promising solution and has been advocated by major service providers to enable targeting and opening a specific page of an app externally with an accessible uniform resource identifier. In this paper, we present a large-scale empirical study to investigate how deep links are really adopted, over 25,000 Android apps. To our surprise, we find that deep links have quite low coverage, e.g., more than 70% and 90% of the apps do not have deep links on app stores Wandoujia and Google Play, respectively. One underlying reason is the mandatory and non-trivial manual efforts of app developers to provide APIs for deep links. We then propose the Aladdin approach along with its supporting tool to help developers practically automate the release of deep-link APIs to access locations inside their apps. Aladdin includes a novel cooperative framework by synthesizing the static analysis and the dynamic analysis while minimally engaging developers» inputs and configurations, without requiring any coding efforts or additional deployment efforts. We evaluate Aladdin with 579 popular apps and demonstrate its effectiveness and performance.
AB - Compared to the Web where each web page has a global URL for external access, a specific 'page' inside a mobile app cannot be easily accessed unless the user performs several steps from the landing page of this app. Recently, the concept of 'deep link' is expected to be a promising solution and has been advocated by major service providers to enable targeting and opening a specific page of an app externally with an accessible uniform resource identifier. In this paper, we present a large-scale empirical study to investigate how deep links are really adopted, over 25,000 Android apps. To our surprise, we find that deep links have quite low coverage, e.g., more than 70% and 90% of the apps do not have deep links on app stores Wandoujia and Google Play, respectively. One underlying reason is the mandatory and non-trivial manual efforts of app developers to provide APIs for deep links. We then propose the Aladdin approach along with its supporting tool to help developers practically automate the release of deep-link APIs to access locations inside their apps. Aladdin includes a novel cooperative framework by synthesizing the static analysis and the dynamic analysis while minimally engaging developers» inputs and configurations, without requiring any coding efforts or additional deployment efforts. We evaluate Aladdin with 579 popular apps and demonstrate its effectiveness and performance.
KW - Android apps
KW - Deep link
KW - Program analysis
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85066888717&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1145/3178876.3186059
DO - 10.1145/3178876.3186059
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85066888717
T3 - The Web Conference 2018 - Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2018
SP - 1469
EP - 1478
BT - The Web Conference 2018 - Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2018
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
Y2 - 23 April 2018 through 27 April 2018
ER -