CONAN: Statically Detecting Connectivity Issues in Android Applications

Mobile apps are increasingly used in daily activities. Most apps require Internet connectivity to be fully exploited. Despite the fact that global access to the Internet has improved over the years, there are still complex connectivity scenarios, including situations with zero/unreliable connectivity. In such scenarios, improper handling of connectivity issues may cause bugs and crashes that worsen the user experience. Even though these issues have been studied in the literature, no automatic detection techniques are available. To address the mentioned gap, we have created the open source CONAN tool. CONAN can statically detect 16 types of connectivity issues within Android apps; it works at the source code level and alerts developers of any connectivity issue, highlighting them directly in the IDE or generating a report explaining the detected errors. In this paper, we present the technical aspects and a video of our tool, which are publicly available at https://tinyurl.com/CONAN-lint.