RedDroid: Android Application Redundancy Customization Based on Static Analysis

Smartphone users are installing more and bigger apps. At the meanwhile, each app carries considerable amount of unused stuff, called software bloat, in its apk file. As a result, the resources of a smartphone, such as hard disk and network bandwidth, has become even more insufficient than ever before. Therefore, it is critical to investigate existing apps on the market and apps in development to identify the sources of software bloat and develop techniques and tools to remove the bloat. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study of software bloat in Android applications, and categorize them into two types, compile-time redundancy and install-time redundancy. In addition, we further propose a static analysis based approach to identifying and removing software bloat from Android applications. We implemented our approach in a prototype called RedDroid, and we evaluated RedDroid on thousands of Android applications collected from Google Play. Our experimental results not only validate the effectiveness of our approach, but also report the bloatware issue in real-world Android applications for the first time.