4XX Client Error: Eventual Connectivity Issues in Android Apps

Camilo Escobar-Velásquez, Alejandro Mazuera-Rozo, Michael Osorio-Riaño,
Claudia Bedoya, Mario Linares-Vásquez, Gabriele Bavota

Mobile apps have become indispensable for daily life, not only for individuals but also for companies/organizations that offer their services digitally. Inherited by the mobility of devices, there are no limitations regarding the locations or conditions apps are being used. For example, apps can be used where no internet connection is available. Therefore, offline-first is a highly desired quality of mobile apps. Accordingly, inappropriate handling of connectivity issues and miss-implementation of good practices lead to bugs and crashes occurrences that reduce the confidence of users on the apps' quality. In this paper, we present the first study on Eventual Connectivity (ECn) issues exhibited by Android apps, by manually inspecting 971 scenarios related to 50 open-source apps. We found 320 instances of ECn issues (6 issues per app, on average) that we organized in a taxonomy of 10 categories. Based on the achieved results, we provide developers and researchers with a set of learned lessons and recommendations for future work.