Diagnosing mobile applications in the wild

There are a lot of applications that run on modern mobile operating systems. Inevitably, some of these applications fail in the hands of users. Diagnosing a failure to identify the culprit, or merely reproducing that failure in the lab is difficult. To get insight into this problem, we interviewed developers of five mobile applications and analyzed hundreds of trouble tickets. We find that support for diagnosing unexpected application behavior is lacking across major mobile platforms. Even when developers implement heavyweight logging during controlled trials, they do not discover many dependencies that are then stressed in the wild. They are also not well-equipped to understand how to monitor the large number of dependencies without impacting the phone's limited resources such as CPU and battery. Based on these findings, we argue for three fundamental changes to failure reporting on mobile phones. The first is spatial spreading, which exploits the large number of phones in the fi...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: HOTNETS
• Authors: Sharad Agarwal, Ratul Mahajan, Alice Zheng, Victor Bahl
• Keywords: Computer Networks, HOTNETS 2010, Large Number, Mobile Applications, Phones