droidbot

Additional

Language
Python
Version
N/A
Created
Jun 9, 2015
Updated
Nov 15, 2023
Owner
The Honeynet Project (honeynet)
Contributors
Ziyue Yang (yzygitzh)
hannoL
Anastasia Shcherbinina (nastya)
Andrea De Pasquale (adepasquale)
MiniMinyi
Luca Degani (ddlucad96)
Saumo Pal (SaumoPal97)
Rohith Raghunathan Nair (codeslord)
Jasonwangsonghe
ilian
Yuanchun Li (yuanchun-li)
Rui Rua (RRua)
connglli
Nipuna Weerasekara (Niweera)
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Source code

DroidBot

News

???? Check out our recent work on integrating LLM with DroidBot to support intelligent task automation on smartphones! AutoDroid

About

DroidBot is a lightweight test input generator for Android. It can send random or scripted input events to an Android app, achieve higher test coverage more quickly, and generate a UI transition graph (UTG) after testing.

A sample UTG is shown here.

DroidBot has the following advantages as compared with other input generators:

  1. It does not require system modification or app instrumentation;
  2. Events are based on a GUI model (instead of random);
  3. It is programmable (can customize input for certain UI);
  4. It can produce UI structures and method traces for analysis.

Reference

Li, Yuanchun, et al. "DroidBot: a lightweight UI-guided test input generator for Android." In Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion (ICSE-C '17). Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2017.

Prerequisite

  1. Python (both 2 and 3 are supported)
  2. Java
  3. Android SDK
  4. Add platform_tools directory in Android SDK to PATH
  5. (Optional) OpenCV-Python if you want to run DroidBot in cv mode.

How to install

Clone this repo and install with pip:

git clone https://github.com/honeynet/droidbot.git
cd droidbot/
pip install -e .

If successfully installed, you should be able to execute droidbot -h.

How to use

  1. Make sure you have:

    • .apk file path of the app you want to analyze.
    • A device or an emulator connected to your host machine via adb.
  2. Start DroidBot:

    droidbot -a <path_to_apk> -o output_dir
    

    That's it! You will find much useful information, including the UTG, generated in the output dir.

    • If you are using multiple devices, you may need to use -d <device_serial> to specify the target device. The easiest way to determine a device's serial number is calling adb devices.
    • On some devices, you may need to manually turn on accessibility service for DroidBot (required by DroidBot to get current view hierarchy).
    • If you want to test a large scale of apps, you may want to add -keep_env option to avoid re-installing the test environment every time.
    • You can also use a json-format script to customize input for certain states. Here are some script samples. Simply use -script <path_to_script.json> to use DroidBot with a script.
    • If your apps do not support getting views through Accessibility (e.g., most games based on Cocos2d, Unity3d), you may find -cv option helpful.
    • You can use -humanoid option to let DroidBot communicate with Humanoid in order to generate human-like test inputs.
    • You may find other useful features in droidbot -h.

Evaluation

We have conducted several experiments to evaluate DroidBot by testing apps with DroidBot and Monkey. The results can be found at DroidBot Posts. A sample evaluation report can be found here.

Acknowledgement

  1. AndroidViewClient
  2. Androguard
  3. The Honeynet project
  4. Google Summer of Code

Useful links