Detecting Resource Leaks on Android with Alpakka

Mobile devices have become integral to our everyday lives, yet their utility hinges on their battery life. In Android apps, resource leaks caused by inefficient resource management are a significant contributor to battery drain and poor user experience. Our work introduces Alpakka, a source-to-source compiler for Android's Smali syntax. To showcase Alpakka's capabilities, we developed an Alpakka library capable of detecting and automatically correcting resource leaks in Android APK files. We demonstrate Alpakka's effectiveness through empirical testing on 124 APK files from 31 real-world Android apps in the DroidLeaks [12] dataset. In our analysis, Alpakka identified 93 unique resource leaks, of which we estimate 15% are false positives. From these, we successfully applied automatic corrections to 45 of the detected resource leaks.