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Undertaking an experience-sampling study via smartphones is complex. Scheduling and sending mobile notifications often requires the use of proprietary software that imposes limits on participants' operating systems (whether iOS or Android) or the types of questions that can be asked via the application. We have developed an open-source platform—Samply—which overcomes these limitations. Researchers can access the entire interface via a browser, manage studies, schedule and send notifications linking to online surveys or experiments created in any Internet-based service or software, and monitor participants' responses—all without the coding skills usually needed to program a native mobile application. Participants can download the Samply Research mobile application for free from Google Play or the App Store, join a specific study, receive notifications and web links to surveys or experiments, and track their involvement. The mobile application leverages the power of the React Native JavaScript library, which allows it to be rendered in the native code of Android and iOS mobile operating systems. We describe Samply, provide a step-by-step example of conducting an experience-sampling study, and present the results of two validation studies. Study 1 demonstrates how we improved the website's usability for researchers. Study 2 validates the mobile application's data recording ability by analyzing a survey's participation rate. The application's possible limitations and how mobile device settings might affect its reliability are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of the paper is to present the approaches of developing mobile applications and the technologies used for this process to facilitate the choice of the right programming approach in the initial phase of an IT project. Design/methodology/approach: Taking the right and adequate decision on choosing the proper approach to software development should be preceded by searching for available solutions and a there reliable comparison. The collected and compared information comes from current scientific sources and official conferences, which is the basis for making the right decisions at the start of a new project. Findings: Hybrid approach to the manufacture of mobile applications provide applications to run the most popular mobile operating systems. However, the technologies used in this programming approach are not adopted to the extent they have been in the native approach. Originality/value: The article summarizes and compares the approaches of developing mobile applications. The presented comparison, together with information on the used technologies, helps system architects and programmers in making a decision about the use of a given programming approach based on the given technologies when creating a new project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information technologies give patients the opportunity to communicate with medical professionals remotely. Telemedicine uses these technologies to provide advanced healthcare and medical services. We present a medical online consultation application based on Web Real-Time Communications (WebRTC) technology enabling chat, audio, and video calls. Communication architecture and protocols of the application are explained in detail. Additionally, the user interface of the application is shown via performed calls. The application is tested and evaluated on different network connections (3G, 4G, local, and DSL) and different browsers and mobile operating systems (Android, Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, iOS, Opera, Safari). During calls, communication quality parameters such as round-trip time (RTT) and packet loss, obtained via the WebRTC application programming interface, are analyzed. 3G, 4G, and local connections show low packet losses (<1%). Packet losses are high (>1%) in Android, Chrome, iOS, Opera, and Safari for DSL connection, but RTT values are low (<100 ms) in all different conditions excluding iOS. In the presented application, RTT and packet loss remain lower than 100 ms and 1%, respectively, in various scenarios, indicating good communication quality. RTT and packet loss are related to total time and hang time parameters, which describe the necessary time to establish and to end a call. It is shown that communication quality of the application can simply be measured by analyzing the total time parameter. This enables predictable information for communication quality for WebRTC-based applications without continuously monitoring RTT and packet loss for the first time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Android and iOS mobile operating systems use permissions to enable phone owners to manage access to their device's resources. Both systems provide resource access dialogues at first use and per-resource controls. Android continues to offer permission manifests in the Android PlayStore for older apps but is transitioning away from this. Neither manifests nor first-use dialogues enable people to easily compare apps based on resource requests, and the corresponding privacy and security risks. Without the ability to compare resource requests when choosing an app, customers cannot select those apps that request fewer resources. Unnecessary and excessive permission requests, overuse of resources, information exfiltration, and risky apps are endemic. To address this issue we built upon past work in warning science and risk communication to design multimedia indicators to communicate the aggregate privacy and security risk associated with an app. Specifically, we provided participants with a privacy rating using the familiar padlock icon and used audio notifications to either warn or reinforce user choices. We empirically tested participants' app decisions with these padlock icons and audio notifications. The results showed that people with both visual cues and audio feedback are more likely to make app choices that are inversely correlated with the resources requested by the app. Those with neither indicators made decisions reflecting only app rating, while decisions made by those with either the audio or the visual indicators are sometimes inversely correlated with resource requests. This illustrates that simple clear communication about apps' aggregate risk, as opposed to atomic resource requests, changes participants' app selections potentially mitigating the state of information overuse and potential abuse. Additionally, neither the visual indicator nor the audio feedback affected the time required for participants to make a decision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the increasing use of smartphones in people's daily lives, mobile accessibility has become a key factor for them. Tourism is one of the sectors that has benefited the most from this growth but has not yet reached its full potential as accessibility has not yet been fully exploited. The main goal of this study is to assess accessibility in mobile applications for the tourism sector. Thus, 14 mobile applications were analyzed, using a manual and automatic methodology through the proposal of an evaluation model divided by quantitative and qualitative requirements, as well as the use of features such as VoiceOver and TalkBack. The results show a high overall number of errors in most quantitative requirements as well as non-compliance with most qualitative requirements. On iPhone 4, "Viseu – Guia da Cidade" was the application with the highest rating, while on Wiko GOA, it was the "JiTT.Travel Funchal" application. In turn, on iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone XR, Nokia 5.1 and OnePlus 6 devices, the best results were achieved by the "Viseu – Guia da Cidade," "JiTT.Travel Funchal" and "TUR4all" applications. Regarding the accessibility of mobile applications on different versions of the same mobile operating system, it was concluded that there are no differences in their accessibility on both operating systems (iOS and Android). Finally, regarding the accessibility of applications on smartphones with different screen sizes, there are also no differences in their accessibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile devices and applications are very popular worldwide. Android and iOS dominate the mobile operating systems market. Most of the mobile applications connect to external servers that process and store users' data. These systems are exposed to malicious attacks and the developers should be always concerned about the applications and data security. This paper presents known threats and vulnerabilities related to mobile applications and proposes a software solution for vulnerabilities analyses (CrawVulns) that aims to help eliminate or mitigate security risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study started from the perspective of predicting science and technology competition, building on this to discuss the dynamic competition between Android and iOS by sales volume in each quarter. The Lotka–Volterra system of equations, one well-known competitive diffusion models, has been adopted to represent the competitive situations of the smartphone operating system market, with the Lyapunov function used to carry out equilibrium and stability analysis. The results showed that Android and iOS have a predator–prey relationship, in which iOS serves as the predator, and Android as a prey. The equilibrium and stability analysis show that both products are able to coexist in the market, and thus, each system has its own stable sales volume. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The GLOBE Program's GLOBE Observer application is a free citizen science mobile data collection and visualization tool compatible with iOS and Android operating systems. Citizen scientists armed with the app can report the mosquito larval habitats they identify using the GLOBE Mosquito Habitat Mapper tool. This data can complement the climate, weather, and land cover data obtained from satellite measurements by scientists who develop risk models for mosquito‐borne diseases. Public participation in mosquito surveillance research provides the opportunity to obtain the volume, velocity and variety of data needed to fight the threat of vector‐borne diseases, especially in under‐resourced communities with minimal to no municipal surveillance and mitigation services. GLOBE Mosquito Habitat Mappers document and describe potential and active mosquito larval habitats in and around their homes and communities. An easy‐to‐use pictorial interface enables users to geolocate and describe oviposition sites encountered, count and identify mosquito larvae, and when appropriate, eliminate the larval habitats. During Mosquito Habitat Mapper's first 3 years of use, over 24,000 data observations have been reported throughout the world. This technical report summarizes GLOBE Mosquito Habitat Mapper data reported by GLOBE citizen scientists from three regions: Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands, and Latin America and the Caribbean. Localized mosquito larvae distribution patterns were examined by comparing data collected in three cities in Senegal–Dakar, Touba, and Thilmakha. The Senegal data show habitat and genera differences among mosquitoes identified by citizen scientists in the cities and illustrates the potential of the app for community‐based surveillance and research. Plain Language Summary: The GLOBE Program's GLOBE Observer application is a free citizen science mobile data collection and visualization tool compatible with iOS and Android operating systems. Citizen scientists using the app can report mosquito larval habitats they identify using the GLOBE Mosquito Habitat Mapper tool. These data can complement the climate, weather, and land cover data obtained from satellite measurements by scientists who develop risk models for mosquito borne diseases. Besides supporting scientific research, GLOBE Mosquito Habitat Mappers contribute concretely to the health of their community by locating and reporting the locations of standing water where adult mosquitos can lay their eggs. When the larval habitat is found in a container, such as a cistern or old tire, citizen scientists use the app to indicate if they have removed, dumped, or covered the standing water so the young mosquitoes can't mature into biting adults. This technical paper describes the data reported by citizen scientists during the first three years since the release of the GLOBE Mosquito Habitat Mapper in Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands, and Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as a closer examination of data in three cities in Senegal, West Africa. Key Points: GLOBE Observer is The GLOBE Program's mobile app. The GLOBE Mosquito Habitat Mapper on this platform enables citizen scientists to identify, describe and report mosquito larvae and habitatsGLOBE Mosquito Habitat Mappers not only collect data, but participate in source reduction and reduce risk of disease in their communityGLOBE Mosquito Habitat Mapper data has practical applications in municipal surveillance as well as in mosquito vector borne disease research [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the transitional conditions of the reform of innovation and information economy, global hypercompetition in agricultural markets, growing awareness and expectations of consumers about the range and quality of products, especially relevant is the use of Ukrainian farmers a set of available information technology and innovation. One of the most promising today is the market for mobile applications, which is characterized by active development. In combination with wireless networks, they have significant potential to expand the time, space and efficiency of farmers. At the same time, mobile technologies open up new communication channels and opportunities for the introduction of agribusiness, potentially offering wider access to public information and basic services. The purpose of the study is to create a software product that will assist in the future in solving problems related to excessive time spent on tracking completed tasks and simplifying this process, and also analyzing the performance of work after the implementation of PP. The object of the study is to improve business processes and optimize standard actions.The methods of the study were chosen to analyze – to evaluate and select the information needed based on the revised, and to compare - to compare two or more similar approaches, or only their separate components, to obtain the required information. As a result of the research, a mobile app with a voice assistant was created for two operating systems: Android and iOS, allowing to keep track of completed tasks for large and small companies and individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The methodological shortcomings characterizing previous experimental research on selective and cross-cutting exposure (e.g. focusing on the impact of a few experimental factors and providing a limited range of choice alternatives) amount to an incomplete description of news choice behavior. This study proposes an alternative method that addresses these shortcomings in testing partisan news selection in the current media environment. A conjoint experiment (N = 746), which simulates a popular mobile news platform (iOS news app), showed that while partisans preferred selecting news from pro-attitudinal sources, they also selected news from counter-attitudinal sources at least once in five times (20%). The tendency to engage in selective exposure was slightly stronger among strong partisans. Our findings indicate that the concerns over partisan selective exposure may not be an issue of "selection" but more of "access" to news sources with different political views. The implications for future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile platforms such as Android and iOS, which are based on typical operating systems, have been widely adopted in various computing devices from smart phones even to smart TVs. Along with this, the necessity of kernel instrumentation framework has also grown up for efficient development and debugging of a kernel itself and its components. Although the existing approaches are providing some information about the kernel state including physical register value and primitive memory map, it is hard for the developers to understand and exploit the information. Moreover, the excessive analysis overhead in the existing approach makes them impractical to be used in real systems. Meanwhile, there have been a few studies on analyzing the user-level applications using dynamic binary translation and they are now widely used. In this paper, by extending this idea of dynamic binary translation for user-level applications to the kernel, we propose a new dynamic kernel instrumentation framework. Our framework focuses on the modules such as device drivers, rather than the kernel itself, since the modules comprise a large portion of OS development. Because of the frequent execution of kernel modules, the dynamic kernel instrumentation framework should guarantee the quality of the translated target code. However, costly optimizations to achieve high execution performance are rather harmful to the overall performance. Therefore, in order to improve performance of both translations, we suggest light-weight translator based on pseudo-machine instruction representation and tabular-base translation instead of typical intermediate representation. We implement our framework on Linux system, and our experimental evaluations show that it could quite effectively instrument the target with nominal overhead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flash storage is integrated for the first time on System zA as a card in the EC12 I/O drawer. This provides a number of functions and benefits in the immediate product, in addition to laying a foundation for further system benefits in future generations of System z systems. Enabling flash MLC (multilevel cell) technology as SCM (storage class memory) in an enterprise-class product required myriad diverse individual technological advances, together with a series of system design features. Extreme care and attention were paid to ensure that the required level of System z reliability was maintained. As with legacy I/O, the programming interface is subchannel-based. The subchannel programming interface is expanded with new architecture via the extended asynchronous-data-move facility. Operating system changes were required to enable exploitation of the features that this new system technology offers. These individual hardware, firmware, and software design aspects are described in this paper, along with the overall functionality and system-level value of this new technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The AndroidA operating system builds upon already well-established permission systems but complements them by allowing application components to be reused within and across applications through a single communication mechanism, called the Intent mechanism. In this paper, we describe techniques that we developed for statically detecting Android application vulnerability to attacks that obtain unauthorized access to permission-protected information. We address three kinds of such attacks, known as confused deputy, permission collusion, and Intent spoofing. We show that application vulnerability to these attacks can be detected using taint analysis. Based on this technique, we developed PermissionFlow, a tool for discovering vulnerabilities in the byte code and configuration of Android applications. To enable PermissionFlow analysis, we developed a static technique for automatic identification of permission-protected information sources in permission-based systems. This technique identifies application programming interfaces (APIs) whose execution leads to permission checking and considers these APIs to be sources of taint. Based on this approach, we developed Permission Mapper, a component of PermissionFlow that improves on previous work by performing fully automatic identification of such APIs for Android JavaA code. Our automated analysis of popular applications found that 56% of the most popular 313 Android applications actively use intercomponent information flows. Among the tested applications, PermissionFlow found four exploitable vulnerabilities. By helping ensure the absence of inter-application permission leaks, we believe that the proposed analysis will be highly beneficial to the Android ecosystem and other mobile platforms that may use similar analyses in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent rise of smartphones has triggered a revolution in mobile development. As a result of this incremental mobile innovation, new software engineering techniques, software documentation, and tools adapted to the mobile platform remain essential in order to help developers to better understand, analyze, and bootstrap porting mobile applications. In this paper, the authors propose a model-driven reverse-engineering approach based on static analysis, which describes a semantic metamodel of the iOS mobile application and extract design information (such as user interfaces, activity diagram, entities, framework and library dependencies) in order to generate the functional specification documentation and the Android UI skeleton. Thus, aiding the project team, who has in charge porting the app to another mobile platform, to agree upon a consensus on what has to be implemented and safe development cost by auto generating the Android UI skeleton project. To experiment this approach, the authors have implemented a tool called iSpecSnapshot. Moreover, they evaluate the performance of iSpecSnapshot by an experiment involving iOS applications that are ported to Android platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses security vulnerabilities and threats in the mobile computing industry, with a focus on the way mobile apps impact tablet computers and smart phones. Topics include how the release of mobile technology has made it difficult for users to keep private information secure, how it has led to an increase in cybercrimes, and security threats for both Android and Apple iOS mobile operating systems.

The article focuses on the development of low-cost smartphone operating systems by new technology firms in comparision to the iOS mobile operating system from Apple Inc. and the Android operating system from Google Inc. It mentions taht several technology firms are oplanning to launch mobile operating systems including the Firefox OS from Mozilla Corp., the Tizen from samsung Electronic Co. Ltd. and the BB Q10 from Research In Motion Ltd.

The software development field has inherently been identified with two field-level institutional logics, i.e., logic of the profession and logic of the markets. Traditionally, information systems development methodologies have been used to reconcile the competing demands from these two logics. In this paper, we study how these two logics manifest in a platform-based software ecosystem where significant entrepreneurial opportunities are created for independent third-party app developers ( indies). Specifically, we study how indie developers manage the two logics on the iOS platform ecosystem under the influence of the platform owner Apple. We first identify practices of indie developers consistent with the two field logics across three entrepreneurial domains, i.e., app ideation, execution, and marketing. Second, we identify areas where the two field logics may be in conflict as well as in coexistence. We show that indie developers enact logic conflict through disagreement and denunciation of the opposing logic. When logics that are inherently opposed appear to coexist, we investigate how app developers manage these opposing demands through a process we call logic synthesis. Using a grounded theory approach, we propose a model of field-level market and professional logics operating in the mobile app platform ecosystem and the practices reflecting such logics in the indie developer community. Our work contributes to the growing literature on platform ecosystems and the processes adopted by third-party app developers in such ecosystems, in addition to furthering the study of institutional logics in technology contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At events, such as conferences, indoor localization is both contextual and ephemeral, in that localization is only needed within the context of and for the duration of the event. As such, the costs and requirements of providing such services need to be minimal. In this paper, we design, implement, and evaluate Tack, a new mobile application framework that is specifically engineered to support such contextual and ephemeral indoor localization during an event. To provide location-based services with Tack, an event organizer only needs to bring and place a small number of (reusable) beacons around the venue before the event begins. As a system framework, Tack uses a combination of known beacon locations, contacts over bluetooth low energy, crowdsourcing, and dead-reckoning to estimate and refine user locations. To make our location estimates more accurate, we embrace the inherent nature of beacons, design crowdsourcing-based inference algorithms, and present an extensive evaluation by running real-world experiments with iOS devices and beacons. Tack has been implemented as an open-source framework on the iOS platform and can be used by mobile applications designed for events with location-based services. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Instant messaging applications continue to grow in popularity as a means of communicating and sharing multimedia files. The information contained within these applications can prove invaluable to law enforcement in the investigation of crimes. Kik messenger is a recently introduced instant messaging application that has become very popular in a short period of time, especially among young users. The novelty of Kik means that there has been little forensic examination conducted on this application. This study addresses this issue by investigating Kik messenger on Apple iOS devices. The goal was to locate and document artefacts created or modified by Kik messenger on devices installed with the latest version of iOS, as well as in iTunes backup files. Once achieved, the secondary goal was to analyse the artefacts to decode and interpret their meaning and by doing so, be able to answer the typical questions faced by forensic investigators. A detailed description of artefacts created or modified by Kik messenger is provided. Results from experiments showed that deleted images are not only recoverable from the device, but can also be located and downloaded from Kik servers. A process to link data from multiple database tables producing accurate chat histories is explained. These outcomes can be used by law enforcement to investigate crimes and by software developers to create tools to recover evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]