A high-level modeling language for the efficient design, implementation, and testing of Android applications -

Abstract

Smartphones global penetration is on the rise, and currently covers more than quarter of the globe's population. Yet, developing mobile applications remains difficult, time consuming, and error-prone, in spite of the number of existing platforms and tools. In this report, we define MoDroid, a high-level modeling language to ease the development of Android applications. MoDroid allows the development of models which represent the core of applications. MoDroid provides Android programmers with the following advantages: (1) Models are built using high-level primitives that abstract away many implementation details allowing application development to be divided over several types of developers; (2) It allows the definition of interfaces between models to automatically compose them, which facilitates testing, and code reusability; (3) Java native android can be automatically generated along with the required permissions thus increasing performance, security, and privacy; (4) It supports efficient model-based testing that operates on models. MoDroid has been fully implemented and was used to develop several non-trivial Android applications. Moreover, MoDroid was compared against current market tools.