Challenges in Mobile Application Development

Abstract

Mobile systems and mobile applications have gained a lot of attention both in research and industry over the last years. The market share of mobile devices is constantly growing. More and more, users expect their mobile devices to provide functionality similar to the one they know from their desktop computers, but also to provide additional, mobile device specific functionality, like location based services. However, software development for mobile devices is still cumbersome and a methodology geared towards supporting the development of such mobile applications is still lacking. While there is broad agreement that developing for mobile devices is more difficult than traditional software engineering, we lack a precise understanding that goes beyond anecdotic evidence of why this is the case and how the situation can be ameliorated. We do not precisely know where and how the development of mobile application differs from “normal” software development and where new methodologies are needed. Aspects that need to be addressed in this context are, among others, the questions of software architectures for mobile applications, approaches to the software design for mobile applications and how the consequences of being mobile, e. g., changing location, changing context, changing connectivity, heterogeneous software and platforms influence the software development process and what design approaches do reflect the specialties of mobile applications and systems appropriately. While this special issue cannot provide a definite or complete answer to these questions, it does provide answers to some important aspects. In the following, we will first try to get a more thorough understanding of some of the main differences between mobile and classical application development and will then discuss how the papers contained in this special issue address these differences.