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MashReDroid: enabling end-user creation of Android mashups based on record and replay

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Abstract

To allow end users to combine different apps for accomplishing various goals, it is desired that they can create mashups of mobile apps in an on-demand fashion. The end user creation of mobile mashups, however, is complicated by the fact that many apps do not expose interfaces for mashup and the lack of user friendly interfaces for end user programming. In this paper, we propose MashReDroid, an end user programming approach for the creation of Android mashups that incorporates the behaviors of backend apps into the execution of a host app. MashReDroid automatically transforms Android apps into mashup enabled apps. It then allows end users to create mashups by recording the interactions between host apps and backend apps and run mashups by replaying the interactions. Our evaluation shows that MashReDroid supports a variety of real scenarios and users can easily create and use mashups with a very low overhead.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2018YFB1004800).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200433, China

    Jiahuan Zheng, Liwei Shen, Xin Peng, Hongchi Zeng & Wenyun Zhao

  2. Shanghai Key Laboratory of Data Science, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200433, China

    Jiahuan Zheng, Liwei Shen, Xin Peng, Hongchi Zeng & Wenyun Zhao

Authors
  1. Jiahuan Zheng
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  2. Liwei Shen
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  3. Xin Peng
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  4. Hongchi Zeng
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  5. Wenyun Zhao
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Correspondence to Liwei Shen.

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Zheng, J., Shen, L., Peng, X. et al. MashReDroid: enabling end-user creation of Android mashups based on record and replay. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 63, 202101 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-019-2646-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-019-2646-2

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