Android app development using Kotlin programming language

Android is an operating system source which offers flexibility and support for most mobile applications, and easy access to social networks. It is important to understand the complexity of design, development, implementation, and testing of Android apps. A number of challenges may be faced in testing android applications, including the lack of testing processes and methods, testing experts being unavailable, poor in-house testing environment, and time restrictions. Mutation testing is a fault-based testing technique, applied by generating mutants and running the application with these mutants to analyze the killed and equivalent mutants. We defined a set of mutation operators according to the features of android applications: apps with content sharing, apps with multimedia, apps with graphics, and apps with user location and maps. We identified 42 mutation operators. In addition, we implemented a new tool, “µ-Android,” which automatically generates mutants and retrieves results to prove the efficiency of the test cases and enable the new operators.

In the era of globalization especially in the 21st century, information and communication technology is moving fast where various applications are developed for the convenience of users. The development of Human Resource android apps for Staff Attendance in Higher Learning Institution is developed for the human resource (HR) department. This information system is very necessary to meet the challenges of rapid technological change compared to conventional technology and will increase the effectiveness. This paper proposed how to design and build an android application that will be utilized to support the Human Resource department. Besides, to ensure the information accuracy and consistency in managing human resource and provide sufficient reports as required. The GPS module is used to track the user’s position and send it to the smartphone. Since the pandemic Covid-19 spread all over the country, most of the staff in KUIPs working from home. This system application is also very useful to universities that have several campuses where each lecturer will use the GPS system as proof of attendance to class. By using this android application Attendance System, users can use this application using their smartphone or any gadget anywhere and anytime. The System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) method is used for software project development. It consists of a proper plan that describes how to build, maintain, replace and modify or improve other software. The research was conducted in Kolej Universiti Islam Perlis (KUIPs) for Human Resource department to facilitate the management of human resources and staff in managing the affairs of employees.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate and appraise the required skills that segues native Android app developers from any level to experts levels. It takes a deep dive into industry demands for Android developer roles in terms of technical skills and mindset. This evaluation is supported by the opinions and experiences of expert native developers coupled with the mindset and discipline mostly worn to ensure a healthy and certain journey to expertise as far as native (that is non-cross-platform android app development in the context of this research) Android application is concerned. To complement this research, a native Android application was built. The aim of this application is to provide useful resources for every tool/skill revealed by our research. With such a system, we believe Android enthusiasts would be able to get a better view into the mind of the industry as well as get a better sense on how to obtain certain talents pertaining to Android development. The journey from developing a 'hello world' program to sophisticated applications such as 'gmail, 'spotify', 'yandex taxi' just to name a few requires an exquisite set of skills, discipline, and mindset something which this research seeks to expose. This study is limited to native Android app development today and reflects a clearer perspective as to what today's mobile industry demands in terms of technical skills, discipline and mindset. Our results contained data such as skills and tools mostly used in Android developer roles according to our respondents (Android developers, recruiters and team leaders) as well as those occasionally used. Mostly used skill contained skills like Kotlin, MVVM, XML, Glide, Material design just to name a few while skills occasionally used include Firebase, Sqlite, Unit testing, Dagger2. Also, skills where categorised into what respondent' believed to be beginner, intermediate and expert levels. In addition to this, various personal opinions were got from respondents about how they would prefer to go about learning a new skill and more than 70% of them thought that they do via building on some small Android project.

In this modern era, women have shown excellence in all walks of life and stand equally with men in all sectors. So has increased violence against women due to this exposure. Hence, women security during travel is one of the critical issues faced by society, from the past and even today. The paper aims at providing a technological solution to this problem. For this, a system for forewarning and safeguarding the female cab users using machine learning is developed. An Android application is developed to collect data, and a virtual panic environment was created to collect the anomalies. The accelerometer data along the three coordinates was captured corresponding to normal and anomalies. Three machine learning models viz support vector machines, logistic regression, and Naive Bayes are trained on data collected, and their test performance is compared in terms of accuracy. This trained model is further integrated with an Android application for real-time data collection and feedback.

In the context of modern Android application development, security issues and secure programming are considered unignorable aspects to ensure the safety of Android applications while still guarantee the development speed. The lack of attention to security factors in the software development process or the delay of traditional security assurance methods are the main causes of unsafe Android software. Those unsafe Android applications contain many vulnerabilities and a high risk of leaking user information, especially since Android applications are rapidly developed and published. Developers must adhere to a secure development process to counter Android application risks to avoid data leakage or access control flaws. Security has to be integrated throughout the application development process to secure the software development life cycle. This paper presents two main research contributions: summarizing common security issues in Android applications and developing a plug-in for Android Studio to support secure programming, 9Fix. The low-time-cost 9Fix plug-in can inspect your vulnerable code and instantly suggest an alternative secure code for developers in programming time that helps to improve the security and instruct the developers on how to write a secure code. Moreover, the developers can add their own security rules to 9Fix so 9Fix can adapt smoothly in a specific situation. We also demonstrate the effectiveness and the convenience based on the student feedback by experimenting with the 9Fix plugin.

Android obfuscation techniques include not only classic code obfuscation techniques that were adapted to Android, but also obfuscation methods that target the Android platform specifically. This work examines the status-quo of Android obfuscation, obfuscation detection and deobfuscation. Specifically, it first summarizes obfuscation approaches that are commonly used by app developers for code optimization, to protect their software against code theft and code tampering but are also frequently misused by malware developers to circumvent anti-malware products. Secondly, the article focuses on obfuscation detection techniques and presents various available tools and current research. Thirdly, deobfuscation (which aims at reinstating the original state before obfuscation) is discussed followed by a brief discussion how this impacts forensic investigation. We conclude that although obfuscation is widely used in Android app development (benign and malicious), available tools and the practices on how to deal with obfuscation are not standardized, and so are inherently lacking from a forensic standpoint.

Mu'allaf is a call for non-Muslims who hope to convert to Islam or inherited Islam whose faith still needs to be supported and strengthened. It is the responsibility of Muslims to give support and strength to Mu'allaf who are now considered brothers in religion, especially in the form of welfare, moral, financial, and learning assistance. When a non-Muslim has entered the religion of Islam, he must learn the ritual of prayer and perform it to the best of his ability as a person who has just learned Islam. However, interpreting these prayers with a guidebook alone is insufficient; considering that they need additional help in terms of words and actions. The Prayers Learning Application is a new method to learn prayers that are taught digitally using the portable platform of Android. Thus, the purpose of this study is to design and develop an android application for teaching prayers for the guidance of Mu’allaf. This android application includes multimedia elements to attract and help users better understand delivering prayers. The study's methodology was based on design and development research (DDR) and Waterfall Model was used as a guide in developing this android application. Adobe Animate 2021 was chosen as a development platform, using Action Script 3.0 as the programming language to develop this android application. This application consists of four modules which are Prayer Note, Prayer Time, Simply Prayer, and Prayer Videos. Three experts from a local higher education institution were appointed to evaluate this android application in terms of its functionality through content, interface, and interaction design. The data analysis is acquired in the form of frequency and percentage. Results revealed that this android application is suitable for new learners, which is the mu'allaf community to learn about prayers. In addition, this android application is expected to provide a positive impact in terms of functionality and usability in the future, especially in teaching prayers for the guidance of Mu’allaf. The application of mobile learning is indeed providing a very useful opportunity to deliver Islamic knowledge widely

According to International Data Corporation (IDC), Android accounted for 81% of all smartphone shipments in the third quarter of 2013. With the increase in smartphones, mobile application installs from Google Play have reached more than 48 billion app installs as revealed by Sundar Pichai, senior vice president, Chrome and Apps at Google I/O 2013. Thus, Android application development has become increasingly popular with the need of an effective software solution for application development and testing. While most Android applications are developed in Java, the Android framework is quite different fromm typical Java frameworks. Thus, while development or testing of Android applications, the user needs to be aware of all the terms and concepts specific to the Android framework such as activity, views and the Android SDK in general.

Third-party libraries (TPLs) as essential parts in the mobile ecosystem have become one of the most significant contributors to the huge success of Android, which facilitate the fast development of Android applications. Detecting TPLs in Android apps is also important for downstream tasks, such as malware and repackaged apps identification. To identify in-app TPLs, we need to solve several challenges, such as TPL dependency, code obfuscation, precise version representation. Unfortunately, existing TPL detection tools have been proved that they have not solved these challenges very well, let alone specify the exact TPL versions. To this end, we propose a system, named ATVHunter, which can pinpoint the precise vulnerable in-app TPL versions and provide detailed information about the vulnerabilities and TPLs. We propose a two-phase detection approach to identify specific TPL versions. Specifically, we extract the Control Flow Graphs as the coarse-grained feature to match potential TPLs in the predefined TPL database, and then extract opcode in each basic block of CFG as the fine-grained feature to identify the exact TPL versions. We build a comprehensive TPL database (189,545 unique TPLs with 3,006,676 versions) as the reference database. Meanwhile, to identify the vulnerable in-app TPL versions, we also construct a comprehensive and known vulnerable TPL database containing 1,180 CVEs and 224 security bugs. Experimental results show ATVHunter outperforms state-of-the-art TPL detection tools, achieving 90.55% precision and 88.79% recall with high efficiency, and is also resilient to widely-used obfuscation techniques and scalable for large-scale TPL detection. Furthermore, to investigate the ecosystem of the vulnerable TPLs used by apps, we exploit ATVHunter to conduct a large-scale analysis on 104,446 apps and find that 9,050 apps include vulnerable TPL versions with 53,337 vulnerabilities and 7,480 security bugs, most of which are with high risks and are not recognized by app developers.

To mitigate the risk of attacks to mobile applications, it is important for mobile application developers to develop secure mobile applications. There have been tools that statically analyze the mobile applications to determine whether there are data leakage or access control vulnerabilities The Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Melon University published CERT Java secure coding rules applicable to developing android applications. This paper describes SACH (Secure Android Coding Helper) - a tool we implemented to help developers identify security vulnerabilities in Android application. The tool analyzes Android application source code to detect violations of CERT Java secure coding rules. This tool will help Android developers to write Android code that comply with CERT Java secure coding rules. It can also be used in the classroom to teach students about Android secure coding.

Programming environments for smartphones expose a concurrency model that combines multi-threading and asynchronous event-based dispatch. While this enables the development of efficient and feature-rich applications, unforeseen thread interleavings coupled with non-deterministic reorderings of asynchronous tasks can lead to subtle concurrency errors in the applications. In this paper, we formalize the concurrency semantics of the Android programming model. We further define the happens-before relation for Android applications, and develop a dynamic race detection technique based on this relation. Our relation generalizes the so far independently studied happens-before relations for multi-threaded programs and single-threaded event-driven programs. Additionally, our race detection technique uses a model of the Android runtime environment to reduce false positives. We have implemented a tool called DroidRacer. It generates execution traces by systematically testing Android applications and detects data races by computing the happens-before relation on the traces. We analyzed 15 Android applications including popular applications such as Facebook, Twitter and K-9 Mail. Our results indicate that data races are prevalent in Android applications, and that DroidRacer is an effective tool to identify data races.

Android application development for online knowledge dissemination is urgently needed at this time. This study aims to develop an android application for learning social skills of children with social emotional barriers. The research participants consisted of 10 students, 75 respondents including teachers and parents of students in partner schools from Jakarta, Purwokerto, Pekanbaru, and Banjarmasin. The design of the android application was validated by four educational experts from universities. Data were collected through questionnaires and FGDs, and analyzed descriptively. The results obtained are the android application model "Maritirukan Aku Bisa with interactive features developed in the form of films, games, movements and songs as well as recording media of student activities, themes developed from aspects of social skills such as attention/concentration, expression/emotions, effective communication, and independence. The android application "Maritirukan Aku Bisa" with updates developed in this study is in accordance with the needs of parents and teachers. The material provided is in accordance with the needs and characteristics of children with social-emotional barriers, and can be accessed independently with the assistance of parents at home. This answers the needs of parents, especially in remote areas throughout Indonesia.

Rapidly increasing numbers of applications and users make the development of mobile applications to one of the most promising fields in software engineering. Due to short time-to-market, differing platforms and fast emerging technologies, mobile application development faces typical challenges where model-driven development can help. We present a modeling language and an infrastructure for the model-driven development (MDD) of Android apps supporting the specification of different app variants according to user roles. For example, providing users may continuously configure and modify custom content with one app variant whereas end users are supposed to use provided content in their variant. Our approach allows a flexible app development on different abstraction levels: compact modeling of standard app elements, detailed modeling of individual elements, and separate provider models for specific custom needs. We demonstrate our MDD-approach at two apps: a phone book manager and a conference guide being configured by conference organizers for participants.

With advancement in technology, the need for human effort is on a steady decrease. Developments in the field of automation enables user friendly interactions for users who are disabled either partially or completely. This technology also allows users to manage their home gadgets simply with the use of a smartphone application. Results have demonstrated that this assistive technology has potential benefits for individuals who are disabled, without the need of any assistance. This android application can also assist in communication between disabled users and their caretakers. This works as a form of Internet of things (IoT) for physically challenged individuals. The elderly people and bedridden individuals will not have to go through the trouble of operating home appliances as this concept offers voice control. For this reason voice command and switches become available options of control for this system. This voice commands are taken by an android application, connectivity is via a Bluetooth module. With the use of relays the home gadgets are linked an Arduino UNO control system. The design of this system makes it affordable and very convenient by serving as Speech Controlled Automation Concept for Disabled Individuals.

Searching for vulnerabilities in Android apps through approaches based on the app's dex bytecode has been applied to a lot of researches. This approach, called late detection, is applied to apps already released, and usually doesn't identify vulnerabilities before users have been exposed. This article presents a method based on static analysis with matching patterns for identifying these vulnerabilities beforehand, during the app development, avoiding users' exposure. The presented technique was evaluated by an experimental test proofapplied to open-source applications, analyzed by appDroidAnalyzer, identifying dozens of apps affected by vulnerabilities in their source code.