SBIR Phase I: NimbleDroid: Combining Program Analysis Breakthroughs and Big Data to Improve Mobile App Performance

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to greatly improve mobile app user experience, boost developer productivity, and speed up mobile innovations by automating the mundane and simplifying the complex in Android app performance debugging and optimization. Apps are now everywhere. They innovate almost every industry. By making it easy to build high-performance apps, users enjoy better experience and developers enjoy better productivity, benefiting every industry and person that use apps. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks to modernize the software development process by combining both program analysis research breakthroughs and big data technologies. Toward this vision, this project aims to build a unique product with innovative technologies to help developers optimize Android app performance. The product continuously tests app performance across code changes to detect performance issues as soon as slow code is introduced. In contrast, existing tools alert developers too late, after real users have been affected and many code changes have been merged, making it both stressful and difficult to find the problematic code. The product gives actionable diagnosis by pinpointing what problematic code developers need to fix and explaining the why and how of the fix. It is thus much more intelligent and easy to use than existing tools.