Detecting Compliance Violations in Android Auto Applications

Android Auto provides a platform for running apps safely while driving, but ensuring apps comply with safety guidelines is challenging. This paper presents our approach to detecting compliance violations in Android Auto applications using static analysis.

Abstract

Despite over 3.5 million Android apps and 200+ million Android Auto-compatible vehicles, only a few hundred apps support Android Auto due to platform-specific compliance requirements. Android Auto mandates service-based architectures in which the vehicle system invokes app callbacks to render the UI and handle interactions, which is fundamentally different from standard Activity-based Android development. Through an empirical study analysis of 98 issues across 14 Android Auto app repositories, we identified three major compliance failure categories: media playback errors, UI rendering issues, and voice command integration failures in line with mandatory requirements for integrating Android Auto support. We introduce AutoComply, a static analysis framework capable of detecting these compliance violations through the specialized analysis of platform-specific requirements. AutoComply constructs a Car-Control Flow Graph (CCFG) extending traditional control flow analysis to model the service-based architecture of Android Auto apps. Evaluating AutoComply on 31 large-scale open-source apps, it detected 27 violations (13× more than Android Lint), while no false positives were observed, achieving 2× faster analysis. Developers have acknowledged 14 of these violations with 8 fixes already implemented, validating AutoComply’s practical effectiveness.

Key Contributions

• We present the first comprehensive study focused on understanding the challenges faced by developers in creating Android Auto-compliant apps.
• We propose Car Control Flow Graph (CCFG), which models the control flow specific to Android Auto apps based on the available features in the apps.
• We developed a novel static analysis specifically designed to identify compliance issues in Android Auto apps, including UI issues and problems with media playback and voice command integration.
• We evaluate AutoComply on real-world apps, showing its effectiveness by detecting 27 issues related to Android Auto compliance, 14 of which were confirmed by developers, and 8 of them have already been fixed.

Tools & Techniques

For further reading, check it out on arxiv.