Dependability Issues of Android Games: A First Look via Software Analysis

Smart phones have surged into popularity in recent years, which has dramatically changed the way people live, work, and have fun. Smart phone games are an important type of Smart phone applications, which attract many software developers. However, they still have not caught much research attention in the software dependability community. In this paper, we study the characteristics of over 2000 Android games with software analysis techniques, with a focus on their dependability issues. Our study suggests that a new security paradigm is of great importance to Smart phone games to prevent potential privilege abuse. Moreover, a new set of testing and debugging approaches should be specifically tailored for Smart phone games, since games are becoming more complicated. Our study also reveals that most games are not specifically optimized according to the user pattern of Smart phones. We expect these open problems can bring more attentions to the software dependability community.