AppSpeedXray

The response time or speed of a mobile app is critical in the aspect of user experience. In the web environment, it is well known that WebPageTest and Google Lighthouse projects present web performance metrics measured through web browsers. However, there is no open-source mobile app performance measurement tool that automates performance tests for the metrics of the mobile app without its source code. In this paper, we propose a mobile app speed measurement tool, AppSpeedXray, that collects mobile app performance data of packet trace, XML log, execution video file, and CPU utilization from the mobile app binary file, and that computes performance metrics. For mobile app-specific performance metrics, we define speed index, first paint time, layout load time, CPU stable time, rendering time after data download, and the aggregated mobile app performance score. Our tool consists of a mobile app crawler to gather Android APK files, a UI automator to generate the user inputs for testing, and a performance analyzer to calculate the performance metrics.