$\omega$Test: WebView-Oriented Testing for Android Applications

WebView is a UI widget that helps integrate web applications into the native context of Android apps. It provides powerful mechanisms for bi-directional interactions between the native-end (Java) and the web-end (JavaScript) of an Android app. However, these interaction mechanisms are complicated and have induced various types of bugs. To mitigate the problem, various techniques have been proposed to detect WebView-induced bugs via dynamic analysis, which heavily relies on executing tests to explore WebView behaviors. Unfortunately, these techniques either require manual effort or adopt random test generation approaches, which are not able to effectively explore diverse WebView behaviors. In this paper, we study the problem of test generation for WebViews in Android apps. Effective test generation for WebViews requires identifying the essential program properties to be covered by the generated tests. To this end, we propose WebView-specific properties to characterize WebView behaviors, and devise a cross-language dynamic analysis method to identify these properties. We develop $\omega$Test, a test generation technique that searches for event sequences covering the identified WebView-specific properties. An evaluation on 74 real-world open-/closed-source Android apps shows that $\omega$Test can cover diverse WebView behaviors and detect WebView-induced bugs effectively. $\omega$Test detected 36 previously-unknown bugs. From the 22 bugs that we have reported to the app developers, 13 bugs were confirmed, 9 of which were fixed.
Comment: Accepted by the 32nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2023)