An App Performance Optimization Advisor for Mobile Device App Marketplaces

On mobile phones, users and developers use apps official marketplaces serving as repositories of apps. The Google Play Store and Apple Store are the official marketplaces of Android and Apple products which offer more than a million apps. Although both repositories offer description of apps, information concerning performance is not available. Due to the constrained hardware of mobile devices, users and developers have to meticulously manage the resources available and they should be given access to performance information about apps. Even if this information was available, the selection of apps would still depend on user preferences and it would require a huge cognitive effort to make optimal decisions. Considering this fact we propose APOA, a recommendation system which can be implemented in any marketplace for helping users and developers to compare apps in terms of performance. APOA uses as input metric values of apps and a set of metrics to optimize. It solves an optimization problem and it generates optimal sets of apps for different user's context. We show how APOA works over an Android case study. Out of 140 apps, we define typical usage scenarios and we collect measurements of power, CPU, memory, and network usages to demonstrate the benefit of using APOA.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figure

Overcoming Language Dichotomies: Toward Effective Program Comprehension for Mobile App Development

Mobile devices and platforms have become an established target for modern software developers due to performant hardware and a large and growing user base numbering in the billions. Despite their popularity, the software development process for mobile apps comes with a set of unique, domain-specific challenges rooted in program comprehension. Many of these challenges stem from developer difficulties in reasoning about different representations of a program, a phenomenon we define as a "language dichotomy". In this paper, we reflect upon the various language dichotomies that contribute to open problems in program comprehension and development for mobile apps. Furthermore, to help guide the research community towards effective solutions for these problems, we provide a roadmap of directions for future work.Comment: Invited Keynote Paper for the 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC'18

How can retailers and lessors adapt to the flexibility requirements brought about by digital transformation

How can retailers and lessors adapt to the flexibility requirements brought about by digital transformation? In order to answer this question, we will study how digital technology has transformed consumer habits. Then, we will study how retailers have been able to adapt and make their shopping areas more flexible. To illustrate the argumentation, we will analyze financials of two companies totally opposed in term of digital transformation: Sephora and Marionnaud

Assisting Developers and Users in Developing and Choosing Efficient Mobile Device Apps

Les applications pour appareils mobiles jouent, de nos jours, un rôle important dans nos vies. Même si la consommation énergétique affecte la durée de vie de la batterie des appareils mobiles et limite l’utilisation des appareils, nous les utilisons presque partout, tout le temps et pour presque tout. Avec la croissance exponentielle du marché des applications pour appareils mobiles, les développeurs ont été témoins d’un changement radical dans le paysage du développement du logiciel. Les applications mobiles présentent de nouveaux défis dans la conception et l’implantation logicielle dus aux contraintes des ressources internes (tel que la batterie, le CPU et la mémoire) et externes (l’utilisation de donnés). Donc, les exigences traditionnelles non-fonctionnelles, tels que la fonctionnalité et la maintenabilité, ont été éclipsées par la performance. Les chercheurs étudient activement le rôle des pratiques de codage sur la consommation énergétique. Cependant, le CPU, la mémoire et les utilisations du réseau sont aussi des mesures importantes pour la performance. Même si le matériel informatique des appareils mobiles s’est beaucoup amélioré dans les dernières années, des nouveaux utilisateurs arrivent, possèdant des appareils bas de gamme avec accès limité aux données. Les développeurs doivent donc gérer les ressources attentivement car les nouveaux marchés possèdent une part importante des nouveaux utilisateurs qui se connectent en ligne pour la première fois. La performance des applications pour les appareils mobiles est donc un sujet très important. Des études récentes suggèrent que les ingénieurs logiciels peuvent aider à réduire la consommation énergétique en tenant compte des impacts de leurs décisions de conception et d’implantation sur l’énergie. Mais les décisions des développeurs ont un impact aussi sur le CPU, la mémoire et l’usage du réseau. Les développeurs doivent aussi prendre en considération la performance au moment d’évoluer le design de l’application des appareils mobiles. Le problème est que les développeurs n’ont pas de soutien pour comprendre l’impact de leurs décisions sur la performance de leurs apps. Ce problème est aussi vrai pour les utilisateurs d’appareils mobiles qui installent des apps en ignorant s’il existe des alternatives plus efficaces. Dans cette dissertation, nous aidons les développeurs et les utilisateurs à connaitre d’avantage l’impact de leurs décisions sur la performance des applications qu’ils développent et qu’ils consomment. Nous voulons aider les développeurs et les utilisateurs à développer et choisir des applications performantes. Nous fournissons des observations, des techniques et des lignes directrices qui aiderons les développeurs à prendre des décisions informées pour améliorer la performance de leurs applications. Nous proposons aussi une approche qui peut servir de complément aux marchés des applications pour appareils mobiles pour qu’ils puissent aider les développeurs et les utilisateurs à chercher des applications efficientes. Notre contribution est un pas précieux vers l’ingénierie de logiciels performants pour les applications des appareils mobiles et un avantage pour les utilisateurs d’appareils mobiles qui veulent utiliser des applications performantes.----------ABSTRACT: Mobile device applications (apps) play nowadays a central role in our life. Although energy consumption affects battery life of mobile devices and limits device use, we use them almost anywhere, all the time, and for almost everything. With the exponential growth of the market of mobile device apps in recent years, developers have witnessed a radical change in the landscape of software development. Mobile apps introduce new challenges in software design and implementation due to the constraints of internal resources (such as battery, CPU, and memory), as well as external resources (as data usage). Thus, traditional non-functional requirements, such as functionality and maintainability, have been overshadowed by performance. Researchers are actively investigating the role of coding practices on energy consumption. However, CPU, memory, and network usages are also important performance metrics. Although the hardware of mobile devices has considerably improved in recent years, emerging market users own low-devices and have limited access to data connection. Therefore, developers should manage resources mindfully because emerging markets own a significant share of the new users coming on-line for the first time. Thus, the performance of mobile device apps is a very important topic. Recent studies suggest that software engineers can help reduce energy consumption by considering the energy impacts of their design and implementation decisions. But developers’decisions also have an impact on CPU, memory, and network usages. So that, developers must take into account performance when evolving the design of mobile device apps. The problem is that mobile device app developers have no support to understand the impact of their decisions on their apps performance. This problem is also true for mobile device users who install apps ignoring if there exist more efficient alternatives. In this dissertation we help developers and users to know more about the impact of their decisions on the performance of apps they develop and consume, respectively. Thus, we want to assist developers and users in developing and choosing, respectively, efficient mobile device apps. We provide observations, techniques, and guidelines to help developers make informed decisions to improve the performance of their apps. We also propose an approach to complement mobile device app marketplaces to assist developers and users to search for efficient apps. Our contribution is a valuable step towards efficient software engineering for mobile device apps and a benefit for mobile device users who want to use efficient apps

Methods for Evaluating the Content, Usability, and Efficacy of Commercial Mobile Health Apps

Commercial mobile apps for health behavior change are flourishing in the marketplace, but little evidence exists to support their use. This paper summarizes methods for evaluating the content, usability, and efficacy of commercially available health apps. Content analyses can be used to compare app features with clinical guidelines, evidence-based protocols, and behavior change techniques. Usability testing can establish how well an app functions and serves its intended purpose for a target population. Observational studies can explore the association between use and clinical and behavioral outcomes. Finally, efficacy testing can establish whether a commercial app impacts an outcome of interest via a variety of study designs, including randomized trials, multiphase optimization studies, and N-of-1 studies. Evidence in all these forms would increase adoption of commercial apps in clinical practice, inform the development of the next generation of apps, and ultimately increase the impact of commercial apps. Boudreaux, Rajani S Sadasivam, Sean P Mullen, Jennifer L Carey, Rashelle B Hayes, Eric Y Ding, Gary G Bennett, Sherry L Pagoto. Originally published in JMIR Mhealth and Uhealth (http://mhealth.jmir.org), 18.12.2017

Universal Skeptic Binder-Droid - Towards Arresting Malicious Communication of Colluding Apps in Android

Since its first release, Android has been increasingly adopted by people and companies worldwide. It is currently estimated that around 1.1 billion Android devices are in use. Even though Android was built with Security principles and comes with a sound security model, it is a favorite target for malware authors. McAfee observed a 76% year on year growth in Android malware during the year 2014 alone. Thus malware is a predominant threat in Android ecosystem. A common attack vector for Android malware is the use of colluding apps. Colluding apps involve two or more applications and operate in two phases. In Phase 1, one application steals private sensitive data of the user In Phase 2, the same application sends the data to another application via covert communication channels. There are several covert channels in Android frameworks. Until now, several solutions in the literature have focused on preventing the extraction of sensitive data from the phone. We, to the best of our knowledge, are the first to stop the flow of sensitive info via the covert channels. We propose, Universal Skeptic Binder-Droid, an enhanced Binder module which enforces policies regarding the use of communication channels and prevents apps from colluding. With our proposed system, we have the added advantage of dynamically configuring policies at run time. Our initial implementation and results on our test bed reflect on the effectiveness and the ease of use of such a system

Metaverse: A Vision, Architectural Elements, and Future Directions for Scalable and Realtime Virtual Worlds

With the emergence of Cloud computing, Internet of Things-enabled Human-Computer Interfaces, Generative Artificial Intelligence, and high-accurate Machine and Deep-learning recognition and predictive models, along with the Post Covid-19 proliferation of social networking, and remote communications, the Metaverse gained a lot of popularity. Metaverse has the prospective to extend the physical world using virtual and augmented reality so the users can interact seamlessly with the real and virtual worlds using avatars and holograms. It has the potential to impact people in the way they interact on social media, collaborate in their work, perform marketing and business, teach, learn, and even access personalized healthcare. Several works in the literature examine Metaverse in terms of hardware wearable devices, and virtual reality gaming applications. However, the requirements of realizing the Metaverse in realtime and at a large-scale need yet to be examined for the technology to be usable. To address this limitation, this paper presents the temporal evolution of Metaverse definitions and captures its evolving requirements. Consequently, we provide insights into Metaverse requirements. In addition to enabling technologies, we lay out architectural elements for scalable, reliable, and efficient Metaverse systems, and a classification of existing Metaverse applications along with proposing required future research directions

The future of online fashion retail: a case study of Zalando SE

The pedagogical case study at hand pivots on Zalando SE, a German online retailer for fashion and accessories, that put innovation and user experience at the core of its business values. In pursuit of European market leadership, Zalando looks at improving the customers’ digital experience through implementing technological features of the next generation. Qualitative and quantitative analyses, which included the online fashion retail market and Zalando’s business performance, were applied in order to gain a holistic understanding of the European e-commerce industry. In a second step, industry trends and critical success factors were analysed and ranked. To answer the guiding question of this case study (How can Zalando SE leverage on its strong market position and technological progress in order to become Europe’s number one online fashion retailer?), future trends and critical success factors are paired with Zalando’s strengths, core values and business model. The case resolution shows that the online retail market is undergoing a shift from a sector where offerings are decided by its merchants to one with offerings dictated by consumers. The tech-savvy e-commerce consumers demand to play an active role in building the consumer-brand-relationship. For consumers, Zalando should become the go-to stylist offering sophisticated fashion products and services through its digital as well as physical channels. For partners and suppliers, Zalando should develop into the go-to advisor for online retail by providing a holistic spectrum of services, such as marketing, logistics and, business development. With this two-track approach, long-term sustainable competitive advantage can be achieved.Este caso pedagógico trata a Zalando SE, um retalhista online de moda, alemão. Esta empresa tem uma visão muito aplicada na inovação e na conveniência para o utilizador, os seus principais valores de negócio. Com vista à liderança, a empresa procura melhorar a experiência digital dos seus clientes. Análises qualitativas e quantitativas foram adotadas de forma a obter uma compreensão holística da indústria Europeia de comércio de moda online, bem como do histórico de negócio e desempenho da Zalando. Numa segunda etapa, tendências do setor e fatores chave de sucesso foram analisados e classificados, sendo alinhados com os pontos fortes da empresa e respetivo modelo de negócio de modo a responder à questão principal deste caso (Como pode a Zalando SE alavancar o seu posicionamento de mercado e progresso tecnológico de forma a tornar-se o retalhista de moda online número um da Europa?). O caso demonstra que o mercado de moda online passa por uma profunda alteração, evoluindo de um setor cuja oferta é determinada pelos retalhistas, para um novo paradigma onde a oferta é ditada pelos consumidores. A Zalando precisa compreender que o futuro e-consumidor deseja desempenhar um papel ativo na relação com as marcas que segue. Para os consumidores, a Zalando deverá tornar-se um ávido consultor no que toca ao retalho online, que oferece um conjunto holístico de serviços, entre os quais o marketing, logística, desenvolvimento do negócio. Assim, e com esta abordagem de duas vias, a vantagem competitiva, sustentável, e a longo prazo poderá, efetivamente, ser alcançada