一句话：提出黑盒工具TouchAlign，通过对比视觉边界与模拟点击得到的交互边界，检测移动应用中的视觉-交互错位缺陷。
移动应用交互设计强调可预测性，要求应用响应符合用户预期。除了功能错位外，工业实践中还存在视觉-交互错位（VIM）：元素的视觉边界与交互边界不一致，导致点击被忽略或触发非预期动作。由于这类缺陷在运行时动态出现，现有静态分析工具无法有效检测。为此，作者提出黑盒工具TouchAlign：利用目标检测提取视觉边界，并通过在元素周围模拟点击来映射交互边界，再比较两者以发现错位。TouchAlign已集成到拥有超过7亿用户的美团App质量保障流水线，发现了一批传统测试遗漏的关键缺陷，有助于维护移动应用的可预测性。
Predictability is a central principle of mobile app interaction design, requiring that an app's responses align with user expectations. Beyond the well-tested functional misalignment, our industrial practice highlights a frequently violated yet formally unexplored aspect: visual-interactive misalignment (VIM), a discrepancy between an element's visual and interactive boundaries. Such misalignments can cause user taps to be ignored or trigger unintended actions, and consequently degrade the overall experience. Due to their dynamic nature during runtime, existing static analysis tools are inherently incapable of detecting these defects. To address this critical gap, we present TouchAlign, a black-box tool that detects VIMs. TouchAlign works by comparing an element's visual boundary, extracted via object detection, against its interactive boundary, which is mapped out by simulating user taps around the element. Integrated into the software quality assurance pipeline of Meituan App (an on-demand lifestyle platform with over 700 million users), TouchAlign has effectively uncovered critical defects that had eluded conventional testing, thereby helping preserve the predictability of mobile applications.
@inproceedings{QiuWWHJYXGYZ26,
title = {What You See Is Not What You Tap: Detecting Misalignments between Visual and Interactive Boundaries in Mobile Apps},
author = {Qingyang Qiu and Xuan Wang and Jintao Wang and Yongxiang Hu and Hailiang Jin and Xingjian Yang and Yao Xu and Shiyu Guo and Juxing Yuan and Yangfan Zhou},
booktitle = {FSE},
year = {2026},
doi = {10.1145/3803437.3805258}
}