Why does the orientation change mess up my Android application? From GUI failures to code faults

Summary This paper investigates the failures exposed in mobile apps by the mobile‐specific event of changing the screen orientation. We focus on GUI failures resulting in unexpected GUI states that should be avoided to improve the apps quality and to ensure better user experience. We propose a classification framework that distinguishes 3 main classes of GUI failures due to orientation changes and exploit it in 2 studies that investigate the impact of such failures in Android apps. The studies involved both open‐source and apps from Google Play that were specifically tested exposing them to orientation change events. The results showed that more than 88% of these apps were affected by GUI failures, some classes of GUI failures were more common than others, and some GUI objects were more frequently involved. The app source code analysis allowed us to identify 6 classes of common faults causing specific GUI failures. This paper investigates the GUI failures exposed in Android mobile apps by the mobile‐specific event of changing the screen orientation and proposes a framework for detecting and classifying GUI failures due to orientation changes. We study the impact of such failures in both open‐source and Google Play apps and show that more than 88% of the considered apps are affected by GUI failures, some classes of GUI failures were more common than others, and some GUI objects were more frequently involved. We analyze the source code of the apps affected by these failures and point out 6 classes of common faults that should be avoided by developers to improve the app quality.