MSA: A Novel App Development Framework for Transparent Multiscreen Support on Android Apps

Abstract

Multi-display Android systems are emerging and require new display management. The current Android design exposes and offloads the multi-screen display management to app developers. As a consequence, apps cannot utilize multi-screen without redevelopment. This paper proposes MSA, a novel Android app development framework for transparent multi-screen support. MSA cooperates with existing Android system services to map the single-screen views provided by apps to multiple screens and maps input events backward correspondingly. Following the new framework, the app development of single-screen Android systems and multi-screen Android systems are unified. Thus, both existing apps and future app development can directly utilize multiple screens with single-screen-based techniques such as multi-window and resizable-activity, instead of redevelopment through multi-screen-dedicated new methods such as presentation classes. We have implemented an MSA prototype with real hardware and released the source code for public access. Experimental results show that using MSA, without any modifications, existing apps can directly run and fully exploit multiple screens with better performance and less overhead compared with the state-of-the-art multi-screen Android system.