Mobile applications: Status and trends
The packing of new technology into handsets becomes increasngly dense, turning traditional resource-constrained cell-phones nto advanced audiovisual devices operating on fast, high-capacity ireless networks. Mobile software advances just as quickly with esearchers and practitioners migrating from desktop-centric to martphone-centric applications. Research in this area is driven by he all-mobile lifestyle, consumer demand and advances in hardare design and communication networks. The steady decrease f mobile data communication charges and the proliferation of evices with large screens, rich-multimedia support and builtn GPS, WiFi, sensors and compass give rise to novel mobile nd nomadic applications. Mobile application developers face umerous challenges related with location and context awareness, ersonalization, mobile data management, porting over multile platforms, devices’ fragmentation, etc. Service providers are esponsible for application management, deployment models and iddleware support. Mobile applications-relevant research currently spans a broad ange of research topics, such as: middleware and distributed ystems in support of mobile applications; context and location wareness; applications personalization issues; application and evelopment platforms and runtimes; supporting toolkits, proramming languages and libraries; application porting and device ragmentation issues; use of novel hardware features and sensors ounted on mobile devices; application lifecycle management and eployment models; mobile applications accessibility issues; secuity and privacy issues; mobile web; mobile HCI. The goal of this special issue is to explore application-layer esearch and development in mobile computing and solicit highuality research works outlining application development and ndustry status and trends. All submitted articles have considred practical applications through case studies, experiments, user