Title: Automating Release of Deep Link APIs for Android Applications,
Abstract: Unlike the Web where each web page has a global URL to reach, a specific
"content page" inside a mobile app cannot be opened unless the user explores
the app with several operations from the landing page. Recently, deep links
have been advocated by major companies to enable targeting and opening a
specific page of an app externally with an accessible uniform resource
identifier (URI). To empirically investigate the state of the practice on
adopting deep links, in this article, we present the largest empirical study of
deep links over 20,000 Android apps, and find that deep links do not get wide
adoption among current Android apps, and non-trivial manual efforts are
required for app developers to support deep links. To address such an issue, we
propose the Aladdin approach and supporting tool to release deep links to
access arbitrary location of existing apps. Aladdin instantiates our novel
cooperative framework to synergically combine static analysis and dynamic
analysis while minimally engaging developers to provide inputs to the framework
for automation, without requiring any coding efforts or additional deployment
efforts. We evaluate Aladdin with popular apps and demonstrate its
effectiveness and performance.