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In-app privacy notices can help smartphone users make informed privacy decisions. However, they are rarely used in real-world apps, since developers often lack the knowledge, time, and resources to design and implement them well. We present Honeysuckle, a programming tool that helps Android developers build in-app privacy notices using an annotation-based code generation approach facilitated by an IDE plugin, a build system plugin, and a library. We conducted a within-subjects study with 12 Android developers to evaluate Honeysuckle. Each participant was asked to implement privacy notices for two popular open-source apps using the Honeysuckle library as a baseline as well as the annotation-based approach. Our results show that the annotation-based approach helps developers accomplish the task faster with significantly lower cognitive load. Developers preferred the annotation-based approach over the library approach because it was much easier to learn and use and allowed developers to achieve various types of privacy notices using a unified code format, which can enhance code readability and benefit team collaboration.
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ANEL: Robust Mobile Network Programming Using a Declarative Language
The dynamics of mobile networks make it difficult for mobile apps to deliver a seamless user experience. In particular, intermittent connections and weak signals pose challenges for app developers. While recent network libraries have simplified network programming, much expert knowledge is still required. However, most mobile app developers are relative novices and tend to assume a reliable network connection, paying little attention to handling network errors in programming until users complain and leave bad reviews. We argue that the difficulty of avoiding such software defects can be mitigated through an annotation language that allows developers to declaratively state desired and actual properties of the application, largely without reference to fault-tolerant concepts, much less implementation. A pre-compiler can process these annotations, replacing calls to standard networking libraries with customized calls to a specialized library that enhances the reliability. This paper presents ANEL, a declarative language and middleware for Android that enables non-experts. We demonstrate the expressiveness and practicability of ANEL annotation through case studies and usability studies on real-world networked mobile apps. We also show that the ANEL middleware introduces negligible runtime performance overhead.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1719155
- PAR ID:
- 10061395
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2018 IEEE/ACM 5th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems (MOBILESoft)
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3197231.3197237
