Dependability Assessment of the Android OS Through Fault Injection

The reliability of mobile devices is a challenge for vendors, since the mobile software stack has significantly grown in complexity. In this article, we study how to assess the impact of faults on the quality of user experience in the Android mobile OS through fault injection. We first address the problem of identifying a realistic fault model for the Android OS, by providing to developers a set of lightweight and systematic guidelines for fault modeling. Then, we present an extensible fault injection tool (AndroFIT) to apply such fault model on actual, commercial Android devices. Finally, we present a large fault injection experimentation on three Android products from major vendors, and point out several reliability issues and opportunities for improving the Android OS.