Enabling on-line dependability assessment of Android smart phones

The increasing complexity of smart phones introduces new dependability threats. Often, novel applications and features are delivered with scarce testing, due to the impressive market pressure. Despite these concerns, there is still little understanding on the dependability behavior of today smart phones. This paper proposes the design of a logging platform for the Android OS. The logging platform enables the collection of failure data, useful to assess the dependability of smart phones at runtime. Preliminary experimental results on real-world Android devices show the feasibility of the approach and encourage further research activities.