Seminar: Analysis and Optimizations for Mobile Apps

When:

10:30 am

Monday February 6th, 2023

Where:

Room 1263

Patrick F. Taylor Hall

ABSTRACT

The rapid evolution of smart devices (e.g., smartphones, smartwatches, and IoT devices) has posed novel challenges for software practitioners. In this talk, first I will discuss how to identify and preserve the app state. Mobile platforms provide a volatile running environment for apps where the state of an app may get destroyed and recreated frequently, either by runtime configuration changes (e.g., changing the phone orientation) or by limited resource availability (e.g., low memory). When the app state is not saved and restored appropriately, the app restarts may cause a wide range of runtime issues, ranging from loss of user progress and poor responsiveness to malfunctioned UI and app crashes. I will present LiveDroid, which automatically identifies and preserves app states. Then, I will talk about how to reduce the binary size of the apps. Mobile apps have grown in binary size, restricting user growth and hindering updates for existing users. Thus, reducing the binary size is important for developers. I will present several novel optimization techniques which achieve up to 20% size reduction on commercial apps, such as TikTok. As opposed to re-invoking the compiler during link time, we perform true linker optimization directly as optimization passes within the linker, which results in minimal build overhead and does not require build pipeline customization. In the end, I will share my future work on program analysis and profiling mobile apps.

Dr. Umar Farooq
Software Engineer, ByteDance

Umar Farooq completed his PhD from UC Riverside. His primary research lies in the area of programming languages and software engineering, with a focus on analyzing and solving practical issues in the development of mobile applications. In addition, he has developed systems that exploit the synergy between software engineering and deep learning methods at scale to address issues in both research areas. His research has been recognized with a Best paper runner-up award at MobiSys, and SIGMobile Research Highlights.