DroidEH: An Exception Handling Mechanism for Android Applications

Oliveira, J; Macedo, H; Cacho, N; Romanovsky, A

doi:10.1109/ISSRE.2018.00030

DroidEH: An Exception Handling Mechanism for Android Applications

Lookup NU author(s): Emeritus Professor Alexander Romanovsky ORCiD

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Abstract

© 2018 IEEE. App crashing is the most common cause of complaints about Android mobile phone apps according to recent studies. Since most Android applications are written in Java, exception handling is the primary mechanism they employ to report and handle errors, similar to standard Java applications. Unfortunately, the exception handling mechanism for the Android platform has two liabilities: (1) the 'Terminate ALL' approach and (2) a lack of a holistic view on exceptional behavior. As a consequence, exceptions easily get 'out of control' and, as system development progresses, exceptional control flows become less well-understood, with potentially negative effects on program reliability. This paper presents an innovative exception handling mechanism for the Android platform, named DroidEH, that provides abstractions to support systematic engineering of holistic fault tolerance by applying cross-cutting reasoning about systems and their components.