Hablar de modernidad es hablar de un entorno digital. Muchas de las actividades que realizamos a diario están ligadas directamente a un dispositivo móvil y a una aplicación, teniendo con ello un sinfín de posibilidades en la palma de nuestra mano: comunicarse con personas en todo el mundo, interactuar en las redes sociales, leer noticias, comprar en cualquier tienda a nivel mundial, conocer el tráfico, escuchar música, ver películas, mirar el clima, etc. Estos procesos de digitalización son utilizados también por el sector bancario, que no ha sido ajeno a estos cambios, a través de canales virtuales, conocidos como banca móvil, servicio proporcionado por estas entidades que permiten a sus clientes realizar diferentes transacciones financieras de forma remota sin tener que ir a una agencia u oficina, como pagar sus deudas, transferir dinero, revisar sus saldos y movimientos bancarios, etc. La banca móvil además, proporciona al cliente otros beneficios como el ahorro de tiempo y un abanico de soluciones financieras de manera inmediata, etc., ventajas que han impulsado su uso en Millennials, segmento de la población nacido entre 1980 y 1999 que para el 2020 será el 50% de la fuerza laboral del país. Esta investigación pretende mostrar cuáles son los factores que influyen para que la banca móvil sea adoptada por este segmento en Lima Urbana, para ello se utilizó el modelo de UTAUT2, considerando los factores intervinientes como el nivel socioeconómico y el banco al que son clientes las personas que fueron encuestadas. / To talk about modernity, it is to talk about a digital environment. Several of our daily tasks are directly linked to a mobile device and to an app, thus having endless possibilities to the touch of a finger: communicate with people around the world, interact in social networks, read the news, buy anything worldwide, live update of the traffic, listen to music, watch movies, the weather, etc. These digitization processes are also used by the banking sector, which has not been oblivious to these changes, through virtual channels, known as mobile banking, service provided by these entities that allow clients to carry out different financial transactions remotely without having to go to an agency or office, such as paying off your debts, transferring money, checking your balances and bank movements, etc. Also, Mobile banking provides clients with other benefits such as saving time and a range of financial solutions immediately, etc., advantages that have boosted its use in Millennials, a segment of the population born between 1980 and 1999 that by 2020 It will be 50% of the country's workforce. This research aims to show what are the factors that influence mobile banking that had to be adopted by this segment in Urban Lima, for this the UTAUT2 model was used, considering the intervening factors such as socioeconomic status and the bank to which people are clients They were surveyed. / Tesis

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / With the large number of Android apps available in app stores such as Google Play, it has become increasingly challenging to choose among the apps. The users generally select the apps based on the ratings and reviews of other users, or the recommendations from the app store. But it is very important to take the security into consideration while choosing an app with the increasing security and privacy concerns with mobile apps. This thesis proposes different ranking schemes for Android apps based on security apps evaluated from the static code analysis tools that are available. It proposes the ranking schemes based on the categories of evidences reported by the tools, based on the frequency of each category, and based on the severity of each evidence. The evidences are gathered, and rankings are generated based on the theory of Subjective Logic. In addition to these ranking schemes, the tools are themselves evaluated against the Ghera benchmark. Finally, this work proposes two additional schemes to combine the evidences from difference tools to provide a combined ranking.

Containers are increasingly used across many different types of computing to isolate and control apps while efficiently sharing computing resources. By using lightweight operating system virtualization, they can provide apps with a virtual computing abstraction while imposing minimal hardware requirements and a small footprint. My thesis is that new container architectures can provide additional functionality, better resource utilization, and stronger security for mobile, drone, and cloud computing. To demonstrate this, we introduce three new container architectures that enable new mobile app migration functionality, a new notion of virtual drones and efficient utilization of drone hardware, and stronger security for cloud computing by protecting containers against untrusted operating systems. First, we introduce Flux to support multi-surface apps, apps that seamlessly run across multiple user devices, through app migration. Flux introduces two key mechanisms to overcome device heterogeneity and residual dependencies associated with app migration to enable app migration. Selective Record/Adaptive Replay to record just those device-agnostic app calls that lead to the generation of app-specific device-dependent state in services and replay them on the target. Checkpoint/Restore in Android (CRIA) to transition an app into a state in which device-specific information the app contains can be safely discarded before checkpointing and restoring the app within a containerized environment on the new device. Second, we introduce AnDrone, a drone-as-a-service solution that makes drones accessible in the cloud. AnDrone provides a drone virtualization architecture to leverage the fact that computational costs are cheap compared to the operational and energy costs of putting a drone in the air. This enables multiple virtual drones to run simultaneously on the same physical drone at very little additional cost. To enable multiple virtual drones to run in an isolated and secure manner, each virtual drone runs its own containerized operating system instance. AnDrone introduces a new device container architecture, providing virtual drones with secure access to a full range of drone hardware devices, including sensors such as cameras and geofenced flight control. Finally, we introduce BlackBox, a new container architecture that provides fine-grain protection of application data confidentiality and integrity without the need to trust the operating system. BlackBox introduces a container security monitor, a small trusted computing base that creates separate and independent physical address spaces for each container, such that there is no direct information flow from container to operating system or other container physical address spaces. Containerized apps do not need to be modified, can still make full use of operating system services via system calls, yet their CPU and memory state are isolated and protected from other containers and the operating system.

Yes / Mobile applications are becoming a preferred delivery method for the government sector and contributing to more convenient and timely services to citizens. This study examines the intention to use mobile applications for the government services (mG-App) in Oman. This study extended the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model by including two constructs namely trust and information quality. Data were collected from 513 mobile application users across Oman. The research model was analysed in two stages. First, structural equation modelling (SEM) was employed to determine significant determinants affecting users’ acceptance of mG-App. In the second stage, a neural network model was used to validate SEM results and determine the relative importance of determinants of acceptance of mG-App. The findings revealed that trust and performance expectancy are the strongest determinants influencing the acceptance of mG-App. The findings of this research have provided theoretical contributions to the existing research on mG-App and practical implications to decision-makers involved in the development and implementation of mG-App in in Oman.

Due to the rapid development of Internet communication technologies (ICTs), an increasing number of social media platforms exist where consumers can exchange comments online about products and services that businesses offer. The existing literature has demonstrated that online user-generated content can significantly influence consumer behavior and increase sales. However, its impact on organizational operations has been primarily focused on marketing, with other areas understudied. Hence, there is a pressing need to design a research framework that explores the impact of online user-generated content on important organizational operations such as product innovation, customer relationship management, and operations management. Research efforts in this dissertation center on exploring the co-creation value of online consumer reviews, where consumers' demands influence firms' decision-making. The dissertation is composed of three studies. The first study finds empirical evidence that quality signals in online product reviews are predictors of the timing of firms' incremental innovation. Guided by the product differentiation theory, the second study examines how companies' innovation and marketing differentiation strategies influence app performance. The last study proposes a novel text analytics framework to discover different information types from user reviews. The research contributes theoretical and practical insights to consumer-centric innovation and social media analytics literature. / PHD

Yes / Health promotion apps designed to support and reinforce health behaviours or to reduce risk behaviours are the most commonly downloaded apps. Such technologies have the potential to reach and deliver health care to new populations. But the extent to which they are successful in enabling the adoption of new and desired behaviours can vary. Some apps are more effective than others, some are free to download while others require a nominal or substantial charge. Cost alone is not indicative of quality or effectiveness. This is important because the use of health apps by the public will likely increase, as is the expectation that health care professionals understand this technology and its heuristic role in personalised health. Practitioners therefore need to be better informed regarding what makes a health app appealing to service users and successful as an intervention to facilitate behaviour change. This paper describes and discusses how the structure and content of health care apps can facilitate or inhibit behavioural change. The aim is to support practitioners in the screening and identification of suitable apps for clinical use. Method: Theory and literature review. Conclusion: App content that involved clinician input at the design stage and included internal drivers such as motivation, self-efficacy and illness understanding and external drivers such as illness information, social networking and user compatibility tend to do better in facilitating behaviour change than those that do not. Of these factors, motivation is considered to be the most important.

Mobile applications play an important role in the dissemination of computing and information resources. They are often used in domains such as mobile banking, e-commerce, and health monitoring. Cost-effective testing techniques in these domains are critical. This dissertation contributes novel techniques for automatic construction of mobile application test suites. In particular, this work provides solutions that focus on the prohibitively large number of possible event sequences that must be sampled in GUI-based mobile applications. This work makes three major contributions: (1) an automated GUI testing tool, Autodroid, that implements a novel online approach to automatic construction of Android application test suites (2) probabilistic and combinatorial-based algorithms that systematically sample the input space of Android applications to generate test suites with GUI/context events and (3) empirical studies to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of our techniques on real-world Android applications. Our experiments show that our techniques achieve better code coverage and event coverage compared to random test generation. We demonstrate that our techniques are useful for automatic construction of Android application test suites in the absence of source code and preexisting abstract models of an Application Under Test (AUT). The insights derived from our empirical studies provide guidance to researchers and practitioners involved in the development of automated GUI testing tools for Android applications.

Mobile apps (or apps) are software applications developed to run on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, among other devices. The number of apps has grown tremendously since Apple opened the first app store in 2008. For example, in March of 2009 the Google Play app store (formerly known as Android Market) had only 2,300 apps, and by mid of 2013 there were more than 800,000 apps. Given the accelerated rate of growth in the number of apps, new software engineering challenges have emerged in order to help ease the software development practices of app developers. In this thesis we examine three examples of these challenges, namely code reuse in mobile apps, app ratings, and the use of ad libraries within apps. We carry out our case studies on thousands of Android apps from the Google Play market. We find that code reuse in mobile apps is considerably higher than in desktop/server apps. However, identical copies of mobile apps are rare. We find that the current ratings system is not able to capture the dynamics of the evolving nature of apps. Thus, we were able to show the need for a more elaborate rating system for the apps. Finally, we observe that a considerable number of free-to-download apps are dependant on ads for their revenue. Our findings suggest that "ad maintenance" is a tough challenge that developers of mobile apps have to face. / Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2013-08-04 22:03:54.577

With the development and growth of mobile technologies, mobile phones enable users to perform a number of different tasks with their devices: from sending simple text messages, checking e-mails and browsing the internet, to running elaborated applications. Nowadays, the mobile phone platform creates great opportunities for businesses, especially due to its capabilities and population coverage: the number of mobile subscriptions approaches global population figures. In order to explore such opportunities, most banks have already launched their mobile applications and/or re-designed mobile version of their websites. One of the benefits of using mobile banking is the possibility for users to carry out bank transactions, such online payments or transfers, at anytime and anywhere. Expectations for the adoption of mobile banking were high; however, it represents about 20% of mobile phone users at the present. One factor has been recognised as being a strong reason for users not to adopt mobile banking: their concerns about security. This dissertation focuses on the relationship between the trust users have in mobile banking and the security risks that the use of mobile devices potentially pose. A questionnaire was created in order to gather users’ perception of security about mobile banking, and its results compared with recognised security issues.

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences. / Department of Communication