A Process to Design and Implement Service-based Android Applications

Mobile Devices, which are developed with the fast growing of the Internet, have flexible internet accessibility and can access the network anywere so that they can execute software applications. However, it is very challenging to deploy highly complex applications on mobile devices since they have limited resources. To overcome the limitation, researches on applying a concept of services to mobile applications have been proposed. Android is one of the popular mobile platforms and is designed to effectively execute mobile applications on the mobile devices having limited resources. Since service-based Android applications, which adopt a concept of services and Android platform, invoke remote services and are built with Android-specific components, they are much different from traditional software applications. Consequently, it is not straightforward to apply object-oriented (OO) analysis and design methods to developing service-based Android applications, although they have been frequently applied to developing traditional applications. In this paper, we present a process to develop service-based Android mobile applications, which extends a traditional OO development process. First, we raise design issues to be considered in developing service-based Android applications. Then, to solve the issues, we present detailed guidelines for essential phases of OO-based development process that are customized to service-based Android applications. Finally, to show applicability of the process, we perform a case study. The proposed design process is effectively utilized as a set of guidelines to develop service-based Android applications more systematically and effectively.