# StoryDroid: Automated Generation of Storyboard for Android Apps

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.00476 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00476/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 1 Feb 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [GUIGAN: Learning to Generate GUI Designs Using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09978/) (2021)
- [GLIB: Towards Automated Test Oracle for Graphically-Rich Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10507/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Investigation into the Use of Image Captioning for Automated Software Documentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01224/) (2023)
- [GUing: A Mobile GUI Search Engine using a Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00145/) (2024)
- [ULDGNN: A Fragmented UI Layer Detector Based on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06658/) (2022)
- [Towards Top-Down Automated Development in Limited Scopes: A Neuro-Symbolic Framework from Expressibles to Executables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01566/) (2022)
- [UI Layers Merger: Merging UI layers via Visual Learning and Boundary Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13389/) (2022)
- [MANA: Towards Efficient Mobile Ad Detection via Multimodal Agentic UI Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20351/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Mobile apps are now ubiquitous. Before developing a new app, the development team usually endeavors painstaking efforts to review many existing apps with similar purposes. The review process is crucial in the sense that it reduces market risks and provides inspiration for app development. However, manual exploration of hundreds of existing apps by different roles (e.g., product manager, UI/UX designer, developer) in a development team can be ineffective. For example, it is difficult to completely explore all the functionalities of the app in a short period of time. Inspired by the conception of storyboard in movie production, we propose a system, StoryDroid, to automatically generate the storyboard for Android apps, and assist different roles to review apps efficiently. Specifically, StoryDroid extracts the activity transition graph and leverages static analysis techniques to render UI pages to visualize the storyboard with the rendered pages. The mapping relations between UI pages and the corresponding implementation code (e.g., layout code, activity code, and method hierarchy) are also provided to users. Our comprehensive experiments unveil that StoryDroid is effective and indeed useful to assist app development. The outputs of StoryDroid enable several potential applications, such as the recommendation of UI design and layout code.