Improving Responsiveness of Android Activity Navigation via Genetic Improvement

Responsiveness issues are one of the key reasons why mobile phone users abandon an app or leave bad reviews. In this work, we explore the use of Genetic Improvement to automatically refactor applications to reduce the time taken to move between and within Android activities, without affecting their functionality. This particular Android responsiveness issue has not previously been tackled before. With its application directly to source code, our approach can be used to complement previous work, which modifies the operating system, or focuses on detection of specific coding patterns. We present a fully automated technique for finding improvements to this responsiveness, which does not require the use of an Android device or emulator. We apply our approach to 7 real-world open source applications and find improvements of up to 30% in navigation response time.