Characterizing Bugs in Login Processes of Android Applications: An Empirical Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The login functionality, being the gateway to app usage, plays a critical role in both user experience and application security. As Android apps increasingly incorporate login functionalities, they support a variety of authentication methods with complicated login processes, catering to personalized user experiences. However, the complexities in managing different operations in login processes make it difficult for developers to handle them correctly. In this paper, we present the first empirical study of login issues in Android apps. We analyze 361 issues from 44 popular open-source Android repositories, examining the root causes, symptoms, and trigger conditions of these issues. Our findings indicate that the vast majority of the login issues are induced by the improper handling of complex state transitions during the login process, which can prevent users from logging in or misdirect them to incorrect subsequent actions. Additionally, we observed that issues related to this cause typically require the convergence of multiple trigger conditions to manifest. These findings can help developers to model the login processes which can help them to identify the causes of issues and design targeted test cases and precise test oracles. Our dataset has been made openly available to facilitate future research in this area.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".