A test case generation approach for mobile APPS based on context and GUI events

The increase of mobile devices with rich innovative feature has become an enabler for developing mobile applications (mobile apps) that offer users an advance and extremely-localized context-aware content. Nowadays mobile apps are developed to address more critical areas of people’s daily computing needs, which bring concern on the applications’ quality. In order to build a high quality and more reliable applications, there is a need for effective testing techniques to test the apps. The most recent testing technique focuses on graphical user interface (GUI) events with little attention to context events. This makes it difficult to identify other defects in the changes that can be inclined by context in which an application runs. The major challenge in testing mobile apps that react to context events is how to identify the events from an application during testing. This study proposes an approach (named TEGDroid) for testing mobile apps considering the two sets of events: GUI and context events. This approach comprises five steps which are; extraction of resources from APK file, static analysis of the extracted app’s byte code to identify GUI events, analysis of mobile apps’ permission to identify different scenarios of context events, generation of test case based on the GUI and context events and validation of the test cases using code coverage and mutation testing. Experiment was performed on real world open source mobile apps to evaluate TEGDroid. Results from the experimental evaluation indicates that the approach is effective in identifying context events and had 61%-91% coverage across the seven (7) selected applications. Results from the mutation analysis shows that 100% of the mutants were killed. This indicates that TEGDroid have the capability to detect faults in mobile apps

An Integrated Framework of Mobile Apps Usage Intention

Over the past decade, mobile devices such as cellular phones and tablet computers have become an essential part of our lives. Mobile devices outsold personal computers for the first time in 2011 and users spend more time with mobile apps than the Internet. Although mobile apps are growing popularity, a number of questions remain to be addressed concerning the usage of mobile apps: What factors contribute to mobile apps usage intentions and how personal traits impact the actual mobile apps usage? This paper classified mobile apps usage motivations into extrinsic, intrinsic and social motives according to user’s variety of personal use of mobile apps. Based on literature review, mobile apps users’ intrinsic motives (i.e., flow theory), extrinsic motives (i.e., perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use) and social motives (i.e., social influences) should impact on usage intentions. This study, applying the technology readiness (TR) concept as personal consumer traits, investigates how the four TR constructs (i.e., innovativeness, optimism, discomfort and insecurity) affect the actual usage intensity of mobile apps. This study further proposes the moderating effect of innovativeness on the relationship between extrinsic motives and mobile apps usage intentions

Characterizing Location-based Mobile Tracking in Mobile Ad Networks

Mobile apps nowadays are often packaged with third-party ad libraries to monetize user data

Promising Beginning? Evaluating Museum Mobile Phone Apps

Since 2009 museums have started introducing mobile apps in their range of interpretative media and visitor services. As mobile technology continues to develop and permeate all aspects of our life, and the capabilities of smart phones increase while they become more accessible and popular, new possibilities arise for cultural institutions to exploit these tools for communicating in new ways and promoting their exhibitions and programmes. The use of mobile apps opens up new channels of communication between the cultural institution and the user, which extent to his or her personal space and go beyond the boundaries of the museum’s walls. The paper presents a survey carried out of mobile apps designed by art or cultural historical museums and analyses the wider issues which are raised by the findings. It discusses, among others, the kind of use these apps were designed to fulfil (e.g. the majority are guided tours to the permanent collections or to temporary exhibitions), the layering of content,and the type of user interaction and involvement they support

Individual Use of Mobile Apps for Social Networking

Organizations are increasingly exploring the business opportunities brought about by social media applications. The ubiquitous access to these applications or their mobile versions (i.e., mobile apps) through smart phones makes them powerful. Understanding how individuals use social media applications to interact and to share information for decision making will help organizations better leverage the power of social media technology for their businesses. A research model is proposed by integrating the end-user computing theory and the psychological empowerment theory to explore the impact of effective use of mobile apps and the psychological empowerment on task innovation and continued use of mobile apps. The model was empirically tested with 390 responses using mobile apps for social networking or communication. Preliminary results suggest that the use of mobile apps and users’ psychological empowerment derived from using mobile apps lead to users’ task innovation and sustained efforts of using mobile apps

Promoting Health Education through Mobile Apps: A Quantitative Analysis of American Hospitals

Using mobile apps as a corporate communication tool helps hospitals to improve their health education initiatives. This paper aims to analyze how these organizations can use mobile apps to implement health education initiatives addressed to patients. To achieve this, we conducted a literature review (health education, mobile apps, role of doctors and patients), and we resorted to using 38 quantitative indicators to evaluate how the 100 best hospitals in the United States manage mobile apps for implementing health education initiatives addressed to patients. Our results prove that 95% of hospitals displayed general mobile apps for patients, but just some of these organizations proposed mobile apps for patients suffering from non-communicable diseases, including: heart diseases (9.47%), cancer (7.37%), chronic respiratory diseases (3.26%), and diabetes (3.16%). We concluded that hospitals should create a department specializing in designing mobile apps that are adapted to patients’ medical and social needs, and that are also consistent with public health priorities

Paving the Way for Digital Transformation: Investigate Customer Experiences of Using Mobile Apps

Background: Mobile apps have become a critical channel for retailers to interact with their customers and digitalize shopping behaviors in the customer journeys. In the transition of digital transformation, convenience stores have launched mobile apps to interact with and particularly collecting data from their customers. It is critical to investigate customer experiences in using mobile apps because it paves the way for successful digital transformation. This paper aims to investigate the customer experiences of convenience stores’ mobile apps from the online reviews. Method: This study proposed a mobile apps quality model as the theoretical framework to empirically test the online reviews of mobile apps. Large volumes of online reviews generated by customers provide important strategic values for business and service design for mobile apps. This paper collected 40,521 online reviews of two leading convenience stores in Taiwan and analyzed with text analysis and qualitative analysis. Results: Applying text analysis and qualitative analysis, this paper identified the critical quality attributes of mobile apps in the convenience stores that need to be improved. In addition, software quality is the major concern that 7-11 Open Point needs to improve, followed by service quality and information quality respectively. Software quality is also the major concern that FamilyMart app needs to improve the customer experiences, followed by service quality and information quality. Moreover, customer dissatisfaction primarily resulted from problems in software quality and information quality. Instead, convenience, ease of use, and practicability of mobile apps lead to customer satisfaction. Conclusion: The results demonstrate that software quality, information quality, and service quality are critical dimensions in affecting customer experiences in using mobile apps. Although different mobile apps may have different priorities of quality attributes that are needed to be improved, these improvements of mobile apps help to enhance customer experiences and accelerate digital transformation of the convenience stores

Mobile APPs and Global Markets

In this research, we examine the popularity of mobile applications across different categories by using the measures of monthly active users (MAUs) of each app. It is the authors’ intention to inspect the key characteristics of mobile apps and the relationship those characteristics have with market share and growth rate in global markets. The ease of use of mobile apps leads to a subsequent impact on the global users’ mobile behavior in daily life. Mobile apps have flooded the market, however, the acceptance and use of individual apps relies on a combination of the preference of users and the operational strategies employed by app developers. Based on secondary data collected from multiple sources including both publications and online data, the global market growth of mobile apps including China (the world’s largest market of mobile apps) has shown a correlation between apps’ market share and the users’ mobile behavior based on messaging, networking, shopping, video watching, and gaming. This research categorizes users’ mobile behavior in terms of age groups and time spent on certain mobile apps. The objective of this investigation is better understanding of the dominance of leading mobile apps and the future trend of mobile apps designed for the global market