Information Technology (IT) evolution in the recent decades has been able to grow the mobility of the end-user. A contributing factor has impacted and improved the smartphone area. This, in turn, has changed end-users’ expectations and experiences in the recent years in terms of available services, which have made mobile applications (apps) to find their place in daily life. In line with the significant growth of smartphones, as the iPhone and Android phones, is also the development of mobile applications exploded. Mobile use has - with this - fundamentally changed and much of what customers used to do on the computer, they do now on their mobile. It makes of course requires that third-parties have a mobile presence and correct utilization, this new arena enormous business opportunities. Hence, as mobile devices become a more visible business tool, it becomes important for organizations to develop applications to meet customer needs and stay competitive. Third-party development is relevantly in the core of software development nowadays. The introduction of smartphones and tablet devices, the associated products, and services in the form of apps has significantly changed software developments practices for developers. The aim of this research formulated to study the development process and practices associated with third-parties and their effects on dealing with various mobile platforms and boundary resources (SKDs and APIs). Qualitative study and exploratory design are extensively conducted for data collection and analysis. Primary data is gathered based on experiences, opinions, and insights from the experts in the subject, and secondary data is gathered from literature, which constantly supports the primary data and ensures the research credibility. The main contribution and results of this study are the factors and development process that third-party developers take into consideration when developing apps for iOS and Android such as ecosystem, programing language, platform, programing model, tools, development process model, supply chain, and submission apps. The success of the digital ecosystems and platform knowledge adopted by Apple and Google has gained a lot of attention from developers in the last years concerning mobile application development. This, in turn, was the key factor of their success at the smartphones market and the portal for developers from all the world.

This thesis studies the Message Queue Telemetry Transport protocol (MQTT) as an application layer protocol in geographical location sharing applications using third generation cellular communication (3G). The MQTT protocol is compared in terms of energy efficiency and amount of data generated with the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which is currently used in typical location sharing applications. In order to compare the communication energy efficiency of both protocols a location sharing application prototype was developed for the Android platform. The application allows the use of HTTP and MQTT and was used to perform a number of experiments. The evaluation experiments show that MQTT is a good candidate as a protocol for location sharing. At comparable bandwidth and energy expenses MQTT offers better quality of user experience, since the subscribers are notified at once when the location of clients of interest has changed. The MQTT protocol is more energy-efficient than the HTTP protocol when the number of other uses with whom the client shares location is low and the location updates are frequent. The experiments also indicate that MQTT protocol is more energy-efficient than HTTP protocol in idle state, when there are no location information updates due to inactivity of all the clients, for example, if they are stationary. This is because MQTT client does not spend energy to poll the server for information updates.

With the popularity of Smart Handset devices, much more discussion of the design and development of embedded systems, some of embedded system problems such as the stability and efficiency of the device, the easy-operating interface design and a variety of application design are more and more important. Application development in the embedded systems is often limited by the system resource such as memory. Compared with common computer systems, embedded system got very limited memory. Therefore, program development in the embedded systems often need to consider the problem of insufficient memory, and program design must also avoid using too large number of memory allocation to cause the program take up a lot of system memory, affecting the system operation, causing the system hazard. Java is one of the common programming languages using in the embedded system development. Based on the high portability, Java programs can easily port to another system environment by using the Java virtual machine. However, the Java programming is also restricted, such as Java programming is not allowed to access memory space direct, and the memory allocation and release are all controlled by the system, rather than users. The purpose of the research is to design a set of Java programming tools. It can be applied to Android Dalvik virtual machine, which is responsible for operating the memory allocation and release, to allow users to control memory so as to ensure that memory can be reused to avoid the system hazard caused by the system memory leak problem.

The launch of Apple iPhone brings the success of App Store application platform, which turns the structure of mobile software industry as well as creating a brand new application business model. It changes not only environment of mobile industry and supply chains, but also the using behaviors of mobile phone users. This research applies wildscale biobligraphy analysis, case study and Delphi method, trying to analyze the market status, business model of application platform. Using 2-phase interviews with smart phone users, developers, and operator, and SWOT and Porter¡¦s Five Force Analysis model to study the business model and strategies for operator¡¦s application platform. The research discovers that telecommunication operator has serveral advantages, such as holding huge user base and payment safety; however, economic scope and service efficiency is the key to the success. Operator should use its strengths and cope with the changing user behavior to create more added value.

This work studies application acceleration for wireless and mobile data networks. The problem of accelerating application can be addressed along multiple dimensions. The first dimension is advanced network protocol design, i.e., optimizing underlying network protocols, particulary transport layer protocol and link layer protocol. Despite advanced network protocol design, in this work we observe that certain application behaviors can fundamentally limit the performance achievable when operating over wireless and mobile data networks. The performance difference is caused by the complex application behaviors of these non-FTP applications. Explicitly dealing with application behaviors can improve application performance for new environments. Along this overcoming application behavior dimension, we accelerate applications by studying specific types of applications including Client-server, Peer-to-peer and Location-based applications. In exploring along this dimension, we identify a set of application behaviors that significantly affect application performance. To accommodate these application behaviors, we firstly extract general design principles that can apply to any applications whenever possible. These design principles can also be integrated into new application designs. We also consider specific applications by applying these design principles and build prototypes to demonstrate the effectiveness of the solutions. In the context of application acceleration, even though all the challenges belong to the two aforementioned dimensions of advanced network protocol design and overcoming application behavior are addressed, application performance can still be limited by the underlying network capability, particularly physical bandwidth. In this work, we study the possibility of speeding up data delivery by eliminating traffic redundancy present in application traffics. Specifically, we first study the traffic redundancy along multiple dimensions using traces obtained from multiple real wireless network deployments. Based on the insights obtained from the analysis, we propose Wireless Memory (WM), a two-ended AP-client solution to effectively exploit traffic redundancy in wireless and mobile environments. Application acceleration can be achieved along two other dimensions: network provision ing and quality of service (QoS). Network provisioning allocates network resources such as physical bandwidth or wireless spectrum, while QoS provides different priority to different applications, users, or data flows. These two dimensions have their respective limitations in the context of application acceleration. In this work, we focus on the two dimensions of overcoming application behavior and Eliminating traffic redundancy to improve application performance. The contribution of this work is as follows. First, we study the problem of application acceleration for wireless and mobile data networks, and we characterize the dimensions along which to address the problem. Second, we identify that application behaviors can significantly affect application performance, and we propose a set of design principles to deal with the behaviors. We also build prototypes to conduct system research. Third, we consider traffic redundancy elimination and propose a wireless memory approach.

To know your whereabouts is important and sometimes exact position is the determinant of success or not. Since the launch of the USA made Global Positioning System (GPS) in the late 1970s, global tracking has been available both for military and civilian use. Today, satellite based systems like the American GPS, European Galileo and the Russian GLONASS are the standard for basically any navigation or location application. However these systems are limited by the fact that they must have connection with multiple satellites in order to work. This means that satellite dependent systems are very limited in indoor environments. Despite this, there is no standard for indoor positioning systems (IPSs) even close to the satellite dependent systems when it regards distribution and accessibility for use where satellite dependent systems are limited or not working. However, this new age of connectivity provides a number of options for positioning indoors. There are some systems available, but very few of them provide good enough accuracy. This Master thesis evaluates different options for indoor positioning using technologies that are available in smart devices and smart phones, such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and focuses on indoor positioning systems that can provide high accuracy. The current state of the technologies and the possible future for them, considering rising need and interest in indoor positioning systems are covered in this thesis. A selection of technologies and approaches are explored, tested in conditions designed for this purpose and evaluated to highlight their differences in approach, accuracy and usability. In order to achieve the goals of this thesis, a hybrid method of experimental research design and system development is selected as the main research method. The hybrid method is focused on experimental research, and is used to investigate if the accuracy of the positioning data can be affected and improved by tuning independent variables in an IPS. To be able to do this, an application for smart devices, such as android smartphones, is developed. The application developed is the heart of the conceptual crossover IPS (CCIPS), which is named Locantis, that is being developed and used in the experimental stages of this investigation. It is also used to test the hypothesis that a CCIPS could be a valid contender for replacing the established IPSs. The observations show how the accuracy and precision of the location data is affected by change to independent variables in an IPS and how well a CCIPS can meet real time requirement’s. The main conclusion is that changes to independent variables have greater impact on the precision than the accuracy for location data in an IPS and that a CCIPS in many cases are the sensible choice of IPS. / Att veta var du befinner dig är viktigt och ibland är exakt position avgörande för framgång. Sedan lanseringen av amerikanska Global Positioning System (GPS) i slutet av 1970 har global navigation varit tillgängliga för både militärt och civilt bruk. Idag är satellitbaserade system, som det amerikanska GPS, europeiska Galileo och det ryska GLONASS, standard för i princip alla navigering eller platsinformation. Men dessa system är begränsade av det faktum att de måste ha kontakt med flera satelliter för att fungera. Detta innebär att satellitberoende system är mycket begränsad i inomhusmiljöer. Trots detta finns det ingen standard för inomhus positioneringssystem (IPSS) som kan mäta sig med de satellitberoende systemen när det gäller distribution och tillgänglighet. Men denna nya generationens kommunikation ger ett antal alternativ för positionering inomhus. Det finns IPS tillgängliga idag, men väldigt få av dem kan tillhandahålla en hög noggrannhet på positioneringen. Detta examensarbete utvärderar olika alternativ för inomhuspositionering med teknologier som är tillgängliga i smarta enheter och smarta telefoner, som Wi-Fi och Bluetooth, fokus ligger på inomhus positioneringssystem som kan ge hög noggrannhet. Det aktuella läget för dessa teknologier och dess möjliga framtid, med tanke på stigande behov och intresse av inomhus positioneringssystem, behandlas i detta examensarbete. Ett urval av teknologier och metoder utforskas, testas under förhållanden utformade för detta ändamål, och utvärderas för att lyfta fram sina skillnader i tillvägagångssätt, noggrannhet och användbarhet. För att uppnå målen i detta examensarbete har en hybrid metod för experimentell designforskning och systemutveckling valts som huvudsaklig forskningsmetod. Hybridmetoden fokuserar på experimentell forskning och används för att undersöka om positioneringsdatas noggrannhet kan påverkas och förbättras genom att förändra oberoende variabler i ett IPS. För att kunna göra detta har en applikation för smarta enheter, så som Android, utvecklats. Applikationen som utvecklats är hjärtat i det konceptuella kombinations inomhuspositioneringssystem Locantis som utvecklas och används i det experimentella stadiet i denna undersökning. Den används också för att testa hypotesen att en CCIPS kunde vara en giltig kandidat för att ersätta den etablerade IPSer. Observationerna visa hur noggrannhet och precision av positioneringsdata påverkas av förändring på oberoende variabler i ett IPS och hur väl ett CCIPS kan uppfylla realtidskravet talet. Huvudslutsatsen är att förändringar på oberoende variabler har större inverkan på precision än noggrannheten för lokaliseringsuppgifter i en IPS och att ett CCIPS i många fall är det klokt val av IPS.

The wide-spread adoption of camera-embedded mobile devices along with the ubiquitous connection via WiFi or cellular networks enables people to visually report live events. Current solutions limit the configurability of such services by allowing video streaming only to fixed servers. In addition, the business models of the companies that provide such (free) services insert visual ads in the streamed videos, leading to unnecessary resource consumption. This thesis proposes an architecture of a real-time video streaming service from an Android mobile device to a server of the user's choice. The real-time video can then be viewed from a web browser. The project builds on open-source code and open protocols to implement a set of software components that successfully stream live video. Experimental evaluations show practical resource consumption and a good quality of the streamed video. Furthermore, the architecture is scalable and can support large number of simultaneous streams with additional increase in hardware resources.

As our society gets increasingly mobile, it is becoming commonplace for residences to remain vacant for a significant amount of time every day. Unfortunately, emergencies can occur during those time, which may require immediate mitigatory action. This project proposes an approach that allows the resident to be notified of such emergencies and to perform mitigatory actions, even when she is hundreds of miles away. Our infrastructure includes three components: (1) programmable sensor devices to detect emergency situations; (2) a Web service hosted in the resident's home computer to send a notification to the smartphone of the user; and (3) a smartphone app that communicates with this Web service to notify the user, and provides a interface for the user to perform any mitigatory action. We develop a prototype system for detecting fire and intrusion emergencies. Our prototype system uses two sunSPOTs as sensors, an iRobot Create® as a mitigatory device, an Android app for user notification. / text

A common problem in existing Search And Rescue (SAR) systems is that they must be activated by the missing person in order to work. This requires an awareness of the the risk of becoming distressed, which in many cases is not feasible. Furthermore, most of the localization systems require specialized hardware.In this thesis, the victim is assumed to wear a cellphone that could be located using readily available consumer electronics. A method of estimating the position of a transmitter, given radio signal measurements at different locations, is developed and verified with real and simulated data. A proof-of-concept system is built in which several users can jointly collect received signal strength data at different locations using mobile phones. The system analyzes the data in real-time and guides the users in the search by estimating the origin of the signal.An outdoor field test is conducted in which the searchers using the system are able to locate the hidden target phone without prior knowledge regarding the position. We are able to localize the victim with an accuracy of 10-20 meters in a timely manner using android smartphones. This shows the potential of a similar system in \abbrSAR scenarios. However, more work is needed to make the system viable in real scenarios and to remove some of the delimitations of the current implementation.

Τα smartphones έχουν γίνει αναπόσπαστο κομμάτι της καθημερινότητας μας δίνοντας στoυς χρήστες τους δυνατότητες που μέχρι τώρα ήταν διαθέσιμες μόνο με την χρήση ηλεκτρονικών υπολογιστών. Εργασίες όπως η πλοήγηση στο διαδίκτυο, η αποστολή και λήψη emails, η χρήση μέσων κοινωνικής δικτύωσης, καθώς και πιο σύνθετες εργασίες όπως η σύνταξη εγγράφων ή η επεξεργασία αρχείων πολυμέσων είναι πλέον εφικτές με τη χρήση smartphones. Παράλληλα με την εξέλιξη των υπολογιστικών δυνατοτήτων των κινητών τηλεφώνων κάποια από τα χαρακτηριστικά που υπήρχαν στα κινητά τηλέφωνα γνώρισαν σημαντική βελτίωση. Πλέον, είναι πολύ δύσκολο να βρεθεί κινητό τηλέφωνο που να μην έχει ενσωματωμένη κάμερα. Κάποιες συσκευές έχουν κάμερες τόσο καλές που συναγωνίζονται επαγγελματικό εξοπλισμό. Αυτές οι εξελίξεις έδωσαν την δυνατότητα στους χρήστες να αποθανατίζουν ακόμη και τις μικρότερες λεπτομέρειες της ζωής τους, αποθηκεύοντας έναν τεράστιο όγκο πολυμεσικών δεδομένων, τοπικά στη συσκευή ή στο νέφος (cloud). Επιπροσθέτως, στις κινητές συσκευές ενσωματώνονται και διάφοροι αισθητήρες, όπως το gps, γυροσκόπια, επιταχυνσιόμετρα, πυξίδες, βαρόμετρα ακόμη και αισθητήρες υγρασίας που προσφέρουν σημαντική πληροφορία σχετικά με το περιβάλλον στο οποίο βρίσκεται ανά πάσα στιγμή ο χρήστης. Η παρούσα διπλωματική ασχολείται με την έννοια του πλαισίου (context) που συγκεντρώνεται από τις κινητές συσκευές, αλλά και από τις κοινωνικές αλληλεπιδράσεις των χρηστών τους και πως αυτό μπορεί να αξιοποιηθεί στο πρόβλημα του αυτόματου σχολιασμού φωτογραφιών σε κινητές συσκευές. Για την καταγραφή του πλαισίου στο οποίο ενεργεί ο χρήστης προτείνεται η αξιοποίηση των αισθητήρων που υπάρχουν ενσωματωμένοι, των μεταδεδομένων που αποθηκεύονται κατά την λήψη της φωτογραφίας αλλά και της δραστηριότητας του χρήστη σε κοινωνικά δίκτυα. / Smartphones have become an integral part of our daily routine, allowing users the capabilities previously only available using computer. Tasks such as surfing the web, sending and receiving emails, using social media, as well as more complex tasks such as drafting or editing multimedia files is now possible using smartphones. Alongside the evolution of computational capabilities of mobile phones, features of them experienced significant improvement. Nowadays, it is very difficult to find a mobile phone that does not have built-in camera. Some devices have cameras so good that are competing professional equipment. These developments have enabled users to immortalize even the most trivial details of their lives resulting in saving a huge amount multimedia data locally on the device or in the cloud (cloud). In addition, mobile devices have integrated various sensors, such as gps, gyroscopes, accelerometers, compasses, barometers even moisture sensors providing important information about the environment in which the user functions. The current master thesis deals with the notion of context that can be collected from mobile devices, but also from social interactions of users and how it can be harnessed to the problem of automatic photo annotation on mobile devices. To capture the context in which the user acts, suggested the use of sensors that are incorporated on the mobile phones, the metadata stored in the image captured but also the user’s activity on social networks.