Modeling the Requirements Based on Contexts in Mobile Native Apps

Mobile apps have found wide acceptance in today’s world which heavily depend on smart technology to access data over wide location. The apps are mostly of native type which can be used for accessing data even without the internet availability. In this paper the development of mobile native applications requires the assimilation of various analytical contexts depending on the requirement of users. We have done an empirical study of various papers based on ubiquitous systems and mobile apps for finding out the contexts in building mobile native apps and the mobile contexts are such as device context, user context, mobility context and social context. We have found that the overall weight of each mobile context is an empirical study. We have taken various activities which are performed among a user and mobile native apps and formed them into questionnaires which are sent to different mobile native app developers of different software industries. The mapping is done among these activities with the attributes and their associated mobile contexts. We have identified and obtained four contexts as main requirements for developing mobile native apps under any domain. The analysis of requirements is done modeling the contexts and their attributes through OWLDL language. We have determined from the empirical study that the overall weight of device context is more than the other contexts. Hence it is clear that the device context with its numerous features have a great impact on developing mobile native apps under any domain.

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a chronic neurodegenerative disorder. People living with MS (plwMS) require long-term, multidisciplinary care in both clinical and community settings. MS-specific mHealth interventions have advanced in the form of clinical treatments, rehabilitation, disease monitoring and self-management of disease. However, mHealth interventions for plwMS appear to have limited proof of clinical efficacy. As native mobile apps target specific mobile operating systems, they tend to have better interactive designs leveraging platform-specific guidelines. Thus, to improve such efficacy, it is pivotal to explore the design characteristics of native mobile apps used for plwMS. This study aimed to explore the design characteristics of native mobile apps used for adults living with MS in academic settings. A scoping review of studies was conducted. A literature search was performed through PubMed, CINAHL, MEDLINE and Cochrane Library. Per native mobile apps, characteristics, persuasive technology elements and evaluations were summarized. A total of 14 native mobile apps were identified and 43% of the identified apps were used for data collection (n=6). Approximately 70% of the included apps involved users (plwMS) whilst developing (n=10). A total of three apps utilized embedded sensors. Videos or photos were used for physical activity interventions (n=2) and gamification principles were applied for cognitive and/or motor rehabilitation interventions (n=3). Behavior change theories were integrated into the design of the apps for fatigue management and physical activity. Regarding persuasive technology, the design principles of primary support were applied across all identified apps. The elements of dialogue support and social support were the least applied. The methods for evaluating the identified apps were varied. The findings suggest that the identified apps were in the early stages of development and had a user-centered design. By applying the persuasive systems design model, interaction design qualities and features of the identified mobile apps in academic settings were systematically evaluated at a deeper level. Identifying the digital functionality and interface design of mobile apps for plwMS will help researchers to better understand interactive design and how to incorporate these concepts in mHealth interventions for improvement of clinical efficacy.

We can notice that security problems of inappropriate integration of native and web technologies in hybrid mobile applications (apps) have been covered in the related state-of-the-art research. However, analyzing hybrid mobile apps' unique behaviors has been seldom addressed. In this paper, we explore the influence of native and web technologies integration in hybrid mobile apps on the generated profile of mobile applications. Specifically, we analyze the type of Security Sensitive APIs (SS-APIs) exposed to web content and identify the corresponding usage patterns by systematically tracking function-call-graphs of a large number of hybrid and native mobile apps. Our investigations indicate that the generated profiles for hybrid and native mobile apps are considerably different. Using our proposed tool, called Hybrid-scanner, for tracking and analyzing internal behaviors of hybrid mobile apps, we show that there is more trace of API calling for triggering a specific SS-API in a hybrid mobile app in comparison with Android native mobile apps. In addition, we have found that almost 40% of SS-APIs in hybrid mobile apps are invoked by third-party libraries, e.g. advertisement libraries. This knowledge, however, is crucial for designing appropriate malware detection or vulnerability mitigation strategies. Based on our results, we discuss two main approaches in Android malware analysis field and enumerate some suggestions which should be considered in order to successfully detect malicious behaviors in such new type of apps.

With over a billion mobile devices in use worldwide and nearly half a billion mobile applications on offer, software developers must make choices between developing one or more versions of native, hybrid or mobile web applications. This paper compares development approaches across these three options and compiles a set of criteria on platforms and devices that can be used in critical development decisions. Key issues for each application development approach are discussed, and a comparative analysis highlights the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. Keywords: App, mobile application, native mobile app, hybrid mobile app, web mobile app, mobile application development

PurposeMobile devices (smartphones, tables etc.) have become the de facto means of accessing the internet. While traditional Web browsing is still quite popular, significant interaction takes place via native mobile apps that can be downloaded either freely or at a cost. This has opened the door to a number of issues related to privacy protection since the smartphone stores and processes personal data. The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent of access to personal data, required by the most popular mobile apps available in Google Play store. In addition, it is examined whether the relevant procedure is in accordance with the provisions of the new EU Regulation.Design/methodology/approachThe paper examines more than a thousand mobile apps, available from the Google Play store, with respect to the extent of the requests for access to personal data. In particular, for each available category in Google Play store, the most popular mobile apps have been examined both for free and paid apps. In addition, the permissions required by free and paid mobile apps are compared. Furthermore, a correlation analysis is carried out aiming to reveal any correlation between the extent of required access to personal data and the popularity and the rating of each mobile app.FindingsThe findings of this paper suggest that the majority of examined mobile apps require access to personal data to a high extent. In addition, it is found that free mobile apps request access to personal data in a higher extent compared to the relevant requests by paid apps, which indicates strongly that the business model of free mobile apps is based on personal data exploitation. The most popular types of access permissions are revealed for both free and paid apps. In addition, important questions are raised in relation to user awareness and behavior, data minimization and purpose limitation for free and paid mobile apps.Originality/valueIn this study, the process and the extent of access to personal data through mobile apps are analyzed. Although several studies analyzed relevant issues in the past, the originality of this research is mainly based on the following facts: first, this work took into account the recent Regulation of the EU in relation to personal data (GDPR); second, the authors analyzed a high number of the most popular mobile apps (more than a thousand); and third, the authors compare and analyze the different approaches followed between free and paid mobile apps.

Transit agencies have begun to provide real-time information (RTI) to riders via mobile and web-enabled devices as a method to address reliability issues. However, it is typically cost-prohibitive for transit agencies to fund custom development of native mobile apps for all popular smartphone platforms. As a result, few cities have full app portfolios that cover all smartphone platforms. This report presents the results of the OneBusAway multi-region project, a collaborative effort that enables the rapid expansion of native mobile transit apps on Android, iPhone, Windows Phone, and Windows 8 to new cities. Tampa, FL was chosen as an initial pilot deployment site for OneBusAway multi-region in early 2013, with a successful public launch following the pilot. As part of the OneBusAway Tampa pilot, an experiment was conducted -200 users were given access to OneBusAway, while another 200 were monitored as a control group without access to OneBusAway. The results show that the primary benefits associated with providing RTI to passengers pertain to waiting at the bus stop. Analysis of "usual" wait times revealed a significantly larger decrease (nearly 2 minutes) for RTI users compared to the control group. Additionally, RTI users had significant decreases in levels of anxiety and frustration when waiting for the bus compared to the control group. Similarly, they had significant increases in levels of satisfaction with the time they spend waiting for the bus and how often the bus arrives at the stop on time. Taken together, these findings provide strong evidence that RTI significantly improves the passenger experience of waiting for the bus, which is notoriously one of the most disliked elements of transit trips. 17.

Smartphone apps support people to adopt healthy lifestyles. Therefore, it is useful to understand the persuasive design strategies involved in hybrid mobile applications that facilitate behavior changes. The aim of our research is to show the ease of use of hybrid mobile applications compared to Web and Native applications. Hybrid mobile apps combine the features of Web apps and Native mobile apps. Like web applications, they are implemented in portable, platform-independent languages such as HTML and JavaScript. They directly access local device resources such as native apps. Transition to hybrid applications has been increasing in recent years with the rapid progress of technology. Although it has performance disadvantages compared to native applications, it is more preferred by software developers due to its ease of use. From the results, it has been determined that the user interface for hybrid applications is simpler to develop with its dynamic structure and it uses mobile device features better in terms of performance when used in hybrid applications.

Smartphone's can play a significant role in maintaining decent Quality of Life for elderly people. Key factor to Smartphone's usage success among elderly people depends on the accessibility of phone interface.Indeed, there is an exponential growth of the elderly population that suffers from age-related disabilities. Accessibility problems should be in mindfor developers. To address these issues in new smart phone devices there is no proper set of guidelines available that focus on this domain. So in this paper the work focuses on: (1) a set of guidelines to keep in mind in order to achieve accessibility in mobileinterfaces for older people. This checklist is the result of a review study of the literature, standards and best practices that are being performedin this area of knowledge, (2) use of this accessibility checklist aimed at elderly people, a survey of three mobile native Apps on androidplatform has been carried out, these Apps have as aim to modify the default interface for another more accessible one.

A large number of web applications are written using server-side scripting languages. Although web browsers allow clients to run these applications, it is often cumbersome to depend on desktops for the services provided by the applications. Given the popularity and convenience of mobile devices, there is a clear need to have native mobile apps driving the applications along with web browsers. In this paper, we present a solution to re-engineer web applications developed using server-side scripting languages, into native mobile apps. The solution takes source code of the web application along with its test suite as input and produces corresponding cross-platform mobile apps. The entire re-engineering process is fully automatic requiring no manual intervention at any stage. Our solution is generic enough not only to handle popular server-side scripting languages, but also to output mobile apps that support diverse popular platforms including Android, iOS, and Windows Mobile. To showcase the capability and generality of our solution, we have developed a prototype tool KIRKE to handle applications developed using JSP, PHP, and ASP.NET. We present three case studies based on real-life codebases to evaluate the correctness, coverage, usability, and performance of our solution. The results indicate that KIRKE is capable of generating a mobile app that preserves the functionality of original web application and uses resources more efficiently when compared to the web application running on a mobile browser.

Given the monopoly over native mobile market for certain kind of apps, a cheaper and an easier to make alternative is necessary. One such alternative are the progressive web apps which solve some of the issues related to the native mobile apps. The goal of the work is to analyse the pros of progressive web apps and native mobile apps and estimate why and at which scenarios the progressive web apps can outcompete native mobile apps in terms of the pros.

Minimizing response time of mobile applications is critical for user experience. Existing work predominantly focuses on reducing mobile Web latency, whereas users spend more time on native mobile apps than mobile Web. Similar to Web, mobile apps contain a chain of dependencies between successive requests. However, unlike Web acceleration where object dependencies can easily be identified by parsing Web documents, App acceleration is much more difficult because the dependency is encoded in the app binary.Motivated by recent advances in program analysis, this paper presents a system that utilizes static program analysis to automatically generate acceleration proxies for mobile apps. Our framework takes Android app binary as input, performs program analysis to identify resource dependencies, and outputs an acceleration proxy that performs dynamic prefetching. Our evaluation using a user study from 30 participants and an in-depth analysis of popular commercial apps shows that an acceleration proxy reduces the median user-perceived latency by up to 64% (1,471 ms).

The proliferation of mobile commerce channels has fundamentally reshaped retail ecosystems, particularly in digital markets like China where smartphone adoption approaches saturation among internet users. While extant literature has extensively examined the impact of new channel introductions (e.g., online, offline, mobile) on firm performance, less attention has been paid to consumer behavioral nuances within established digital interfaces. Addressing this gap, our study pioneers a comparative analysis of purchasing dynamics across two dominant yet technologically distinct channels: native apps versus light-app channels (e.g., WeChat mini-programs). While both channels share core mobile attributes (e.g., small screen sizes, on-the-go accessibility), their divergent technological architectures (Swift, Kotlin, and Java vs. HTML, CSS, WXML, and WXSS) create systematically differentiated consumer experiences. Through econometric analysis of 185,437 transaction records from a multichannel B2C platform, we reveal that consumers tend to spend more, purchase more items, and exhibit a lower likelihood of product returns when shopping through the light-app channel compared to native apps. More importantly, these behavioral divergences are moderated by product categories, price levels, and discount depths. Our findings contribute to the multichannel retailing literature by providing new insights into consumers’ behavioral differences between the two popular, yet distinct, mobile channels. Based on these insights, we suggest that multichannel retailers should prioritize channel convenience and accessibility and reconsider their investments in mobile native apps. Additionally, retailers should tailor assortments, pricing, and discount strategies to each channel to effectively engage consumers and stimulate purchases. Our research also emphasizes the importance of aligning marketing, operations, and finance strategies in multichannel retailing.

BackgroundGiven the effective role of a mobile applications in disease management, disease monitoring, and self-care in patients with COVID-19 disease, we aimed to design, development and evaluation of a self-care Mobile app for COVID-19 patients not requiring hospitalization.MethodsThe design, development and evaluation the usability of the self-care and education mobile app for patients with COVID-19 disease were conducted in two main phases at 2021 in Northwest of IRAN; (1) Determine the features and capabilities and (2) Design, development and evaluation of self-care mobile App. JAVA programming languages and Android Operating System were used and selected to design and development of a mobile app. There were 25 participants who conducted evaluations of the mobile app’s usability and impact using the mobile health app usability a Questionnaire of User Interface Satisfaction was administered to assess the usability of the developed application. The results were analyzed via Excel 2013.ResultsThe model of developing a mobile app as an Information System was the Waterfall model. The smartphone application based on a set of capabilities and features was designed and consists of two main parts: the login screen for user registration, and the main home menu. The user interface includes three main pages or activities; (a) Main Menu for quick access to all of the pages, (b) Symptom management and monitoring to monitor the signs and symptoms during the illness, and (c) Set Reminders and Alarms to notify patients. The users’ mean score of the application usability was calculated as 7.91 out of 9 indicating a good level of satisfaction.ConclusionThis app can be a guideline and a useful tools for managing and monitoring symptoms, reminding medications, and implementing self-care instructions in outpatients. The authors suggest evaluating the efficacy and functionality test of mobile-based applications for COVID-19 in clinical trial studies.

In the dynamic e-commerce environment, social commerce has emerged as a revolutionary force, transforming how consumers interact and transact online. This paper investigates the differences in customers’ search and purchase patterns between a prominent online retailer’s burgeoning social commerce channel, the WeChat mini-program, and its native mobile app. We analyze the customers’ entire journey through a sequential search model that encapsulates decisions from channel selection to product search, search termination, and the final purchase. This study contributes to the search model literature by being the first to estimate both fixed and marginal search costs in a sequential search model in an omnichannel retail environment. We calculate fixed search costs, marginal search costs, and preferences for each channel, revealing differences in customers’ behaviors across channels. Our analysis shows that customers’ fixed search costs are higher, but marginal costs are lower on WeChat channel compared to the App channel. Also, customer characteristics like historical spending levels and search timing influence their search costs. From these insights, we suggest strategies tailored to each channel capitalizing on the differences in customers’ search costs. The first strategy encourages search initiation by lowering fixed search costs through peer-to-peer link sharing in the WeChat channel. The second strategy aims to minimize marginal search costs using search-triggering coupons in the App channel. Implementing these strategies significantly boosts conversion rates and profits for the online retailer. This research is one of the first to explore the differences between traditional retail channels and emerging social commerce channels.

Sleep problems are common and costly in the US military. Yet, within the military health system, there is a gross shortage of trained specialist providers to address sleep problems. As a result, demand for sleep medicine care far exceeds the available supply. Telehealth including telemedicine, mobile health, and wearables represents promising approaches to increase access to high-quality and cost-effective care. The purpose of this study was to evaluate patient engagement and provider perceived effectiveness of a novel sleep telehealth platform and remote monitoring assessment in the US military. The platform includes a desktop web portal, native mobile app, and integrated wearable sensors (ie, a commercial off-the-shelf sleep tracker [Fitbit]). The goal of the remote monitoring assessment was to provide evidence-based sleep treatment recommendations to patients and providers. Patients with sleep problems were recruited from the Internal Medicine clinic at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Patients completed intensive remote monitoring assessments over 10 days (including a baseline intake questionnaire, daily sleep diaries, and 2 daily symptom surveys), and wore a Fitbit sleep tracker. Following the remote monitoring period, patients received assessment results and personalized sleep education in the mobile app. In parallel, providers received a provisional patient assessment report in an editable electronic document format. Patient engagement was assessed via behavioral adherence metrics that were determined a priori. Patients also completed a brief survey regarding ease of completion. Provider effectiveness was assessed via an anonymous survey. In total, 35 patients with sleep problems participated in the study. There were no dropouts. Results indicated a high level of engagement with the sleep telehealth platform, with all participants having completed the baseline remote assessment, reviewed their personalized sleep assessment report, and completed the satisfaction survey. Patients completed 95.1% of sleep diaries and 95.3% of symptom surveys over 10 days. Patients reported high levels of satisfaction with most aspects of the remote monitoring assessment. In total, 24 primary care providers also participated and completed the anonymous survey. The results indicate high levels of perceived effectiveness and identified important potential benefits from adopting a sleep telehealth approach throughout the US military health care system. Military patients with sleep problems and military primary care providers demonstrated high levels of engagement and satisfaction with a novel sleep telehealth platform and remote monitoring assessment. Sleep telehealth approaches represent a potential pathway to increase access to evidence-based sleep medicine care in the US military. Further evaluation is warranted.