An Empirical Understanding of Black Screen Abnormality in Android Multi-View

With the increase of requirements for multi-line operations of users, the multi-view mechanism is gradually developed and supported by recent Android versions. However, the underlying exceptions and bugs raised by such mechanisms tend to be neglected by both the developer and system maintainer. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we first conduct a systematical investigation to explore the defects that are possibly raised by the multi-view. We found the black screen problems are especially prevalent in the multi-view context. Based on this finding, we then analyzed the potential reason behind the problem and developed a detection framework to detect this type of defect in a dynamic way. In the experiments on real-world apps collected from the Android market, we find over 86% of apps can be detected to have the black screen risk in multi-view. The finding is not only detected by our automated framework but also verified manually.