XTrace: A Non-Invasive Dynamic Tracing Framework for Android Applications in Production

Abstract: As the complexity of mobile applications grows exponentially and the fragmentation of user device environments intensifies, ensuring online application stability faces unprecedented challenges. Traditional methods, such as static logging and post-crash analysis, lack real-time contextual information, rendering them ineffective against "ghost bugs" that only manifest in specific scenarios. This highlights an urgent need for dynamic runtime observability: intercepting and tracing arbitrary methods in production without requiring an app release. We propose XTrace, a novel dynamic tracing framework. XTrace introduces a new paradigm of non-invasive proxying, which avoids direct modification of the virtual machine's underlying data structures. It achieves high-performance method interception by leveraging and optimizing the highly stable, built-in instrumentation mechanism of the Android ART virtual machine. Evaluated in a ByteDance application with hundreds of millions of daily active users, XTrace demonstrated production-grade stability and performance. Large-scale online A/B experiments confirmed its stability, showing no statistically significant impact (p > 0.05) on Crash User Rate or ANR rate, while maintaining minimal overhead (<7 ms startup latency, <0.01 ms per-method call) and broad compatibility (Android 5.0-15+). Critically, XTrace diagnosed over 11 severe online crashes and multiple performance bottlenecks, improving root-cause localization efficiency by over 90%. This confirms XTrace provides a production-grade solution that reconciles the long-standing conflict between stability and comprehensive coverage in Android dynamic tracing.