APPx: An Automated App Acceleration Framework for Low Latency Mobile App

Abstract

Minimizing response time of mobile applications is critical for user experience. Existing work predominantly focuses on reducing mobile Web latency, whereas users spend more time on native mobile apps than mobile Web. Similar to Web, mobile apps contain a chain of dependencies between successive requests. However, unlike Web acceleration where object dependencies can easily be identified by parsing Web documents, App acceleration is much more difficult because the dependency is encoded in the app binary. Motivated by recent advances in program analysis, this paper presents a system that utilizes static program analysis to automatically generate acceleration proxies for mobile apps. Our framework takes Android app binary as input, performs program analysis to identify resource dependencies, and outputs an acceleration proxy that performs dynamic prefetching. Our evaluation using a user study from 30 participants and an in-depth analysis of popular commercial apps shows that an acceleration proxy reduces the median user-perceived latency by up to 64% (1,471 ms).