Detecting inconsistencies in multi-platform mobile apps

Due to the increasing popularity and diversity of mobile devices, developers write the same mobile app for different platforms. Since each platform requires its own unique environment in terms of programming languages and tools, the teams building these multi-platform mobile apps are usually separate. This in turn can result in inconsistencies in the apps developed. In this paper, we propose an automated technique for detecting inconsistencies in the same native app implemented for iOS and Android platforms. Our technique (1) automatically instruments and traces the app on each platform for given execution scenarios, (2) infers abstract models from each platform execution trace, (3) compares the models using a set of code-based and GUI-based criteria to expose any discrepancies, and finally (4) generates a visualization of the models, highlighting any detected inconsistencies. We have implemented our approach in a tool called CheckCAMP. CheckCAMP can help mobile developers in testing their apps across multiple platforms. An evaluation of our approach with a set of 14 industrial and open-source multi-platform native mobile app-pairs indicates that CheckCAMP can correctly extract and abstract the models of mobile apps from multiple platforms, infer likely mappings between the generated models based on different comparison criteria, and detect inconsistencies at multiple levels of granularity.