Lightweight Code Outlining for Android Applications

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Abstract
Android employs Ahead-of-Time (AOT) pre-compilation to enhance application launch speed and runtime performance. However, these generated OAT files over-consume the scarce memory and storage resources on mobile devices, leading to degraded user experience. Our analysis of several Android applications reveals an average code redundancy of 25.4%. To reduce the code size via redundancy elimination, we propose Calibro , a C ompilation- a ssisted li nk-time b ina r y code o utlining method. However, it will incur high build overhead, so we introduce several optimizations to better suit resource-limited mobile devices. Besides, we also propose optional filtering strategies to further meet performance requirements. Experimental results show that, under common scenarios, our method reduces the OAT file code size by 19.6% and the runtime memory usage by 15.4% on average, with negligible runtime performance degradation in terms of user experience and tolerable build overhead. Therefore, the proposed method shows promise for industrial deployment on real-world Android mobile devices.
Funding Information
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (62472330)