MCon: Building an Elastic Cloud for Android Applications with Framework Consolidation

Cloud execution of mobile apps—running unmodified apps inside full mobile OSes on commodity servers—is gaining adoption for uses such as GUI agent training and large-scale app testing. These workloads are both temporally dynamic (from second-scale agent interactions to hour-long tests) and highly bursty (up to hundreds of concurrent jobs), demanding an elastic platform that can provision mobile environments both quickly and at high density. Existing stacks fall short because each tenant has a separate copy of the mobile framework (a large collection of shared libraries and system services), which is slow to start and heavy to keep.