Resource Leak or Mismanagement

[Yuge-Nie]

Please consider making a Pull Request if you are capable of doing so.

App Version:
1.28.4

Affected Device(s):
Google Pixel with Android 11.0

Describe the bug:
Our team is developing a tool that can automatically identify potential resource issues in Android applications.

To detect resource anomalies, we designed five neutral cycles—GUI event sequences that should not increase resource usage:

① DOC (Double Orientation Change)
② Home (Return to Home Screen → Resume AUT)
③ Notification (Open Notification Bar → Close Notification Bar)
④ Text (Input Text → Clear Text)
⑤ Scroll (Swipe Down/Right → Swipe Up/Left)

The first three cycles are designed to trigger 3 main pairs of lifecycle callback functions (i.e., onCreate() and onDestroy(), onStart()/onRestart() and onStop(), onResume() and onPause()), while cycles ④ and ⑤ are based on UI interaction semantics, covering user input and scrolling scenarios that may also affect resource usage.

If executing a specific neutral cycle 50 times in a given state leads to continuous growth in certain resource metrics, we regard it as a potential resource leak or mismanagement issue that may cause software aging.

The bugs that have been successfully reproduced are uploaded here.textpad.zip
There may be some inaccuracies in state recognition, which could lead to duplicate reports. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Each bug corresponds to one screenshot (A)—the image shows the page where the issue occurs.
Other information is encoded in the image filename as follows:

{ActivityName (B)}_{ExecutedNeutralCycle (C)}_{ResourcesWithContinuousGrowth (D)}

We would greatly appreciate it if the developers could help us verify whether these issues truly exist. Your timely confirmation would be extremely valuable to our research and development efforts.

To Reproduce:
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Open the Android app under test.
2. Execute the specified neutral cycle (based on C) 50 times in the indicated activity/state (based on A & B).
3. Observe the monitored resource metrics (based on D).
4. Identify whether any metric shows continuous growth.

Expected behavior:
Neutral cycles should not cause resource metrics to continuously increase.

[Yuge-Nie]

FYI, our bug reports mention "object" resource leaks, which refers to the cumulative count of the following 13 Android system objects tracked by the framework:

• UI Components (4 types):
  • Views - Total view instances in the view hierarchy
  • ViewRootImpl - Root view implementations managing window/view connections
  • AppContexts - Application context instances
  • Activities - Activity instances in memory
• Resource Managers (2 types):
  • Assets - Asset objects loaded from APK
  • AssetManagers - Asset manager instances
• IPC & Communication (6 types):
  • Local Binders - Local Binder objects for same-process IPC
  • Proxy Binders - Proxy Binder objects for cross-process IPC
  • Parcel memory - Memory used by Parcel objects (in KB)
  • Parcel count - Number of Parcel instances
  • Death Recipients - Binder death notification recipients
  • OpenSSL Sockets - Active OpenSSL socket connections
• Web Components (1 type):
  • WebViews - WebView instances

All these object counts can be easily obtained from Android's dumpsys meminfo <package_name> output.