iFixDataloss: A Tool for Detecting and Fixing Data Loss Issues in Android Apps

Android apps are event-driven, and their execution is often interrupted by external events. This interruption can cause data loss issues that annoy users. For instance, when the screen is rotated, the current app page will be destroyed and recreated. If the app state is improperly preserved, user data will be lost. In this work, we present a tool iFixDataloss that automatically detects and fixes data loss issues in Android apps. To achieve this, we identify scenarios in which data loss issues may occur by analyzing the Android life cycle, developing strategies to reveal data loss issues, and designing patch templates to fix them. Our experiments on 66 Android apps show iFixDataloss detected 374 data loss issues (284 of them were previously unknown) and successfully generated patches for 188 of the 374 issues. Out of 20 submitted patches, 16 have been accepted by developers. In comparison with state-of-the-art techniques, iFix-Dataloss performed significantly better in terms of the number of detected data loss issues and the quality of generated patches.