Behind Defective Mobile AR Apps: Studying Reviews and Bugs of Android AR Software with Comparison to Prior Bug Studies

As Augmented Reality (AR) applications grow in popularity, understanding and addressing AR software bugs becomes crucial. AR applications, due to their interaction with the physical world, present unique challenges that differ from traditional software. In this study, we try to understand the root causes of commonly complained mobile AR bugs. In our study, we collected user reviews from Google Play market, and issue reports from open source AR software projects from GitHub. We categorized bug symptoms and root causes, and studied the correlation between them. We further studied the fixing commits of these bugs and compare their distribution with findings from prior bug studies. Our study finds that (1) AR apps users are mostly affected by dysfunction bugs such as Hang and Crash and these bugs are common in AR apps, (2) API Misuse is the mostly common root cause of AR bugs, and property setting error is the most common form of API Misuse, (3) a small number of API patterns and event handling practices may account for a large portion of API Misuse, and (4) besides AR UI symptoms and the API Misuse root cause, bugs in AR apps have similar characters with bugs in other Android apps.