Context. With the pervasive nature of mobile phones, many mobile health (mHealth) apps are released in market. It is of supreme importance to consolidate compliance right in the development of app. There are many policies and regulations formed in various countries that fundamentally protect patient information. Further, there are stringent actions taken for not complying with the regulations. This being the case, how do app developers from start-up to small scale companies find solutions to the problem? It is necessary to study the situation from developer’s perspective to create innovation and sustain. Objectives. In this study, we identify tools, techniques, methods or process used by developers to create a compliant app. This study also throws light on challenges being faced by the developers. Finally, a guideline is devised for the app developers to facilitate in development of a compliant app. Methods. A case study is performed with two data collection methods namely interviews and survey questionnaire to strengthen the findings. With not much of literature support, interview study helped in gaining perspective of developers instrumental in creation of survey instrument. Results. Different tools, techniques, methods, processes used by developers were identified. Alongside, challenges were also listed based on the importance level. Further, a guideline was drafted that serves as recommendation for the app developers in development of complaint mobile health app. The guideline devised is at a higher level that can help developers focus on key aspects with regards to development of a complaint mHealth app.   Conclusions. Author concludes that app developers mainly use project management tools available. There is a need for specific tools, techniques to be developed for the developers such that it becomes easy for app developers to develop compliant mHealth app. In fact, there must be effective guidelines drafted in the clearest possible way that can be used by developers without any ambiguity. This research acts as an exploratory study aimed at identifying the current practice of developers. More research is needed in this field to solve the developers’ problem.

Det här arbetet utforskar jämförelsen mellan progressiva webbapplikationer (PWA) och native mobila applikationer. Arbetet belyser ett problem som är aktuellt idag och kommer att vara ännu mer så i närmaste framtid på grund av den ständiga teknikutvecklingen och människans beroende av mobila applikationer. Användningen av mobilen har ökat kraftigt under de senaste årtiondena med mobila applikationer som integreras i människans livsstil. Denna tillväxt indikerar att utvecklingen av applikationer behöver justeras för en effektivare och säkrare metod. Även om native applikationen för närvarande leder, utmanar PWA mer än tidigare på grund av dess effektivitet och enkelhet. Genom att utveckla en PWA och en native mobilapplikation syftar denna studie på att identifiera de huvudsakliga skillnaderna. Analysens fokus var att visa de tre kritiska aspekterna, hastighet, säkerhet och utvecklingstid, med resultaten som tyder på att PWA presterar bättre i form av hastighet när den optimeras, men native mobila applikationen har en större tillgänglighet för implementering av funktioner. Dessa resultat berikar den pågående diskussionen med ytterligare förståelse för de två mest populära strategierna för att skapa en mobilapplikation och ger information om hur appscenen möjligen kan utvecklas i framtiden. / This thesis explores the comparison of progressive web applications (PWA) with native mobile applications. This thesis sheds light on an issue that is relevant today and will be even more so in the near future due to the constant advancement of technology and the growing dependence of human life on the use of mobile applications. The use of the mobile has increased significantly over the past couple of decades with the mobile application being integrated into the human lifestyle. This pattern of growth indicates that the development of the applications needs to be adjusted for an effective and more secure approach. Although the native application is currently the leading app, the PWA puts on a more extensive challenge than before due to its effectiveness and simplicity. By developing one PWA and one native mobile application, this study aims to identify the key differences. The focus of the analysis was to demonstrate the three critical aspects, speed, security and time of development with the results showing that the PWA performs better in terms of speed when being optimized, but the native mobile application has a larger access base for feature implementation. These results enrich the ongoing discussion with further understanding for the two most popular strategies of crafting a mobile application, with information about how the future of the app scene possibly evolve.

The mobile application market is becoming increasingly fragmented with the availability of multiple mobile platforms that differ in development procedures. Developers are forced to choose to support only some platforms and specific devices due to limited development resources. To address these challenges, numerous tools have been created to aid developers in building cross-platform applications, however, there is no metric to evaluate the quality of these tools. This thesis introduces a framework for evaluating the features, performance and discuss development experience of existing and future cross-platform development tools. The framework is implemented by benchmarking several tools and the results identify a disparity in the features and performance. This research is carried out in collaboration with industrial partner Desire2Learn, through an NSERC Engage Grant. / NSERC, Desire2Learn

The use of and research on gamification has increased substantially since 2010. Most of the research on gamification has been done within education, specifically higher education. There is a dearth of research on gamification for children with disabilities. There has also been much research on the characteristics of successful instructional and educational games. In this thesis, theory on both gamification and the characteristics of successful instructional and educational games were used to design and implement several game design elements in a mobile sign language learning application to make it more enjoyable for the users. The game design elelemnts implemented were points, appropriate challenge, proximal goals, randomness and control. The target group of the application is children with disabilities making the thesis unique compared to any previous research. A rigorous gamification methodology was followed and a meeting with experts on children with special educational needs was held to get a good understanding of the target group. The development was done iteratively with two-week long iterations. After each iteration a presentation was held for the intern company and feedback was given. A school was willing to participate in an evaluation session and at the end of the thesis and the session was held with 22 children with learning disabilities. Both the original application and the application with the added gamification elements were evaluated and the results were compared. Results found that the children using the new version of the application had less throughput and found learning sign language to be more enjoyable and easier compared to the children using the original version of the application. The results are questionable, however, due tolimitations of the evaluation. Some of the issues were that the ages of the children differed between the groups, the severity of the disabilities was not considered, and the participants only got to use one version of the application for fifteen minutes. / 自2010以来，游戏化技术的使用和研究大幅增加。在教育领域,特别是高等教育领域,有很多很多关于游戏化的研究。关于成功教学和教育游戏的特征也有很多相关研究。然而目前对残疾儿童游戏化技术的研究尚不多见。本文运用游戏化理论和成功教学游戏和教育游戏的特点，设计并实现了移动手语学习应用中的几个游戏设计元素，使移动手语学习应用更加有趣。实施的游戏设计要素有明确的目标、难度的选择、随机性、点和层次。应用的目标群体是残疾儿童，使得本论文与以往研究有所不同。我们遵循严格的游戏化方法，并与特殊儿童教育专家举行会议，以便更好地了解目标群体。用两星期的时间进行迭代开发。每次迭代后，在实习生公司进行演示并得到反馈。一所学校愿意参加评测，在论文结束时，22名有学习障碍儿童参加了评测。对原有应用和添加游戏化元素的应用进行评价，并对结果进行比较。结果发现，使用新版本应用程序的儿童比使用原始版本应用程序的儿童的工作量较少，并且学习手语过程更愉快、更容易。然而由于评估的局限性,可能会影响实验结果,例如各组儿童的年龄不同，残疾的严重程度没有考虑，并且参与者只能使用一个版本的应用程序15分钟。后续研究将评估这些因素的影响。

Many desktop applications have moved away from heavy client-side programs tolighter web-based solutions served from the cloud. Mobile applications have also beentraditionally client-based in the form of native applications. With the use of HTML5,however, there is a growing shift towards web apps as opposed to native. HTML5technologies are enabling mobile apps to run in the browser with some native appfunctionality. HTML5 has received a great deal of attention since its release in 2009,there are numerous articles and discussions on the Internet. Some developers are verynegative and some are very positive towards the idea that it is a serious contender inmobile application development. This report presents research carried out to get theviews of developers as to their current use of HTML5 and how much they expect tobe developing mobile apps using HTML5 in the future. Judging by the level ofresponse gained and comments given, this is a very hot topic right now. The researchshows that HTML5 is a viable alternative to native app development but it has somelimitations and has some way to go before it could begin to replace native appdevelopment altogether.

There has been an enormous growth in the usage of smartphones in recent times. Smartphones are not limited to communication purposes. It has various applications designed as per the daily requirements of humans such as web-searching, online shopping, bank transactions, games, etc. With the increase in the usage of the smartphone, the more useful information is captured and stored by it, which raises the question of security. The goal of this research is to develop two android applications. One is a sensor detector application and the second is a screen lock application. The first application will help the user to identify all the hidden sensors and working sensors on the mobile phone. This application even describes the features and usage of every sensor in detail. Using a graphical description of each sensor which depicts the behaviour of each sensor as per environment/movement. The second application is designed using a combination of two sensors. Screen lock applications contain two main factors. One is to work properly in all cases and efficiently do the functions that are required to do. The second is to maintain a smooth inner system interaction because in addition to locking the screen this application should make sure to hide the display of all the other applications without closing the process of these applications. With the increase in the usage of the smartphone, it becomes difficult for older generations to memorize the security pattern techniques and use them. This thesis develops a simple technique in the mobile authentication android application. The thesis is developed on the Android studio platform. The background functionality of the app is coded in java using android SDK tool and frontend of the application is designed using XML files. The GENYMOTION emulator and a mobile phone are used to test the output.

The number of available mobile applications (or apps) as well as the usage of these are rapidly increasing. With this increase there naturally also follows an increased competitiveness in the app market, with developers needing to produce apps of high perceived quality in order to get return users and also needing to make their apps available to multiple different platforms and devices. With substantial platform and device fragmentation, this is often a difficult and costly task. While traditionally an app basically had to be build from scratch for each platform it needed to support, in later years alternative development techniques for what is called cross-platform development have emerged and seen a rapid increase in usage. Contrary to native development, cross-platform development aims to enable development of a single codebase that can then run on all platforms. The idea is that this would save development time and thereby cost. Academic literature was found to often evaluate and compare performance differences between apps developed with cross-platform frameworks and their natively developed counterparts. Typically, these studies reported several reoccurring drawbacks with cross-platform development, compared to native development. However, research within the field was found to be lacking in regard to developers’ experience in general, and specifically whether this focus on comparing performance and listing pros and cons was representative of the concerns of industry developers. This study aimed to begin filling this gap, byinvestigating the extent to which these developers were relating any drawbacks to cross-platform development as well as which these were. Also, the study sought to answer how big a part this awareness of drawbacks played in the decision when developers chose to develop natively instead of cross-platform. With this, the goal of the study was ultimately to discussthe state of cross-platform research and whether it focused on aspects that were relevant to the industry. Data in this study was gathered in two ways: (1) a literature study, aiming to get an image of the current state of cross-platform research and (2) a web survey, in which app developers were invited through various groups in Facebook and Reddit. Ultimately, the results indicated that industry developers were to a large extent relating the same drawbacks to cross-platform development as were found to be frequently reported by academia. Further, all of the survey participants that related drawbacks to cross-platform development and ever chose to develop natively instead of cross-platform, did so to a very large degree because of those drawbacks. There were limitations to both the planning and the execution of the methods that were used, primarily in the gathering of data but also the analysis of this. However, it was still deemed possible to conclude that the results of the study indicated that research regarding cross-platform development could reasonably keep its current focus moving forward, as this appeared to be of high relevance to the industry.

Health and fitness apps have become ubiquitous as smart devices become a major necessity in day-to-day life. However, an obvious issue with mobile health (mHealth) apps is that a substantial portion of them lack a scientific foundation and instead utilize  experiential  stratagems.  Hence,  the  acquired  data  becomes  unreliable.  In sports, where data collection is extensive, this becomes a vital factor for success due to  the  increasing  usage  of  mHealth.  Therefore,  the  Swedish  School  of  Sport  and Health Sciences has, in collaboration with other organizations, created the Perceived Load  and  Fitness  Scale  Questionnaire.  The  purpose  of  this  questionnaire  is  to function as a marker for overtraining, and thus injury prevention and intervention will become a simpler and more efficient task. A computer software was developed for the questionnaire; however, a mobile version was required, and thus requested. Consequently, the mHealth prototype app eValuate was developed. Research, in the form of literature studies, and dissection of other apps, for additional information, contributed  to  the  development  of  it.  The  prototype  was  developed  using  the programming language Java with Android Studio as the Integrated Development Environment  and  Cloud  Firebase  Firestore  as  a  database  solution.  The  finished prototype, eValuate, had to be trialled to ensure that it satisfies the criteria. Thus, the Mobile Application Rating Scale was employed as the most appropriate means of evaluation. A small-scale study was planned to trial the prototype by utilizing this scale.  However,  due  to  unforeseen  events,  only  four  respondents  could  provide feedback. The prototype performed admirably and scored 3.8 stars out of 5 stars. Nonetheless, the testing sample is too small to draw any real conclusions.

Mobile applications are a critical part of everyday life. Animations in mobile applications demand optimized performance, which developers are persistently striving to achieve. This study examines the performance of mobile applications developed using native approaches for iOS and Android, as well as the Flutter framework for cross-platform approach, while executing animations. This was motivated by the fact that while cross-platform development offers advantages in terms of development efficiency, it often results in decreased performance. Since the field of mobile development is continuously evolving, it is important to explore new capabilities of mobile technologies. The purpose of this study is to understand the differences in CPU and RAM usage between native and cross-platform applications by examining two types of animation implementations, thereby aiming to identify the causes of the performance gap and propose solutions to decrease the performance gap. This study involved experiments, a literature study and an analysis of the results to address the research questions and fulfill the purpose. The findings of this study showed that the cross-platform approach resulted in higher CPU and RAM usage than the native approaches. However, the performance gap was less noticeable in one of the animation implementations. Thus indicating that the performance of mobile applications can be significantly influenced by the choice of animation implementation. Therefore, a strategic approach to mitigating the performance gap could involve careful selection of Flutter widgets or the incorporation of efficient libraries.

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