  Android is the most popular mobile operating system in the world, running on
more than 70% of mobile devices. This implies a gigantic and very competitive
market for Android apps. Being successful in such a market is far from trivial
and requires, besides the tackling of a problem or need felt by a vast
audience, the development of high-quality apps. As recently showed in the
literature, connectivity issues (e.g., mishandling of zero/unreliable Internet
connection) can result in bugs and/or crashes, negatively affecting the app's
user experience. While these issues have been studied in the literature, there
are no techniques able to automatically detect and report them to developers.
We present CONAN, a tool able to detect statically 16 types of connectivity
issues affecting Android apps. We assessed the ability of CONAN to precisely
identify these issues in a set of 44 open source apps, observing an average
precision of 80%. Then, we studied the relevance of these issues for developers
by (i) conducting interviews with six practitioners working with commercial
Android apps, and (ii) submitting 84 issue reports for 27 open source apps. Our
results show that several of the identified connectivity issues are considered
as relevant by practitioners in specific contexts, in which connectivity is
considered a first-class feature.
