Mobile Technology and Software Engineering

Travis James, CTO, CloudMetal Software

State of the TechnologyWhere we came from…

Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) was standard application environment

Limited browsing capability

Low bandwidth

Fragmented hardware

Smart phones not so smart

Where we are… iOS, Android, BlackBerry operating

environments

Highly capable browser driven by WebKit

HTML5 becoming application standard cross platform

Standard hardware, fragmented operating systems (especially Android)

Explosion in Application Development Started with release of iPhone 3 in May 2008

500,000 apps in AppStore

200,000 apps in Android Market

Driven by social networking, content delivery/streaming, and games

Location awareness of devices makes software offerings unique

Global mobile data almost tripled (2.6x) in 2010

Mobile ComponentsHardware

ARM Chip Technology (32-bit RISC)

Assisted GPS

Solid State Drives, Micro SD Cards

512 MB RAM on iPhone 4/4S, Android 2.2

Flashable boot ROM architecture

Software UNIX style operating systems (BSD,

Linux)

Sandbox application models

WebKit browser with HTML5, CSS3

Microsoft devices have Silverlight-based OS, .NET runtime

The Business of Mobile Commerce via AppStore, Google Checkout, “Wallet” software, PayPal

integration with Near Field Communication coming

App sales models include B2C, Freemium, Ad-Funded, InApp purchase, Subscription

Mobile applications enable brands to maintain presence, relevance, connections with customers

Mobile payment transactions will grow from $250B today to $1 Trillion by 2015

Application Development and Testing The business of mobile applications forcing much shorter development cycles

Great dependence on highly available, scalable web services

Running apps in emulators is nothing like running on devices

Accounting for speed of networks and bandwidth availability results in different application architecture

Hybrid development allows for efficient consumption of content

Security considerations are different (WiFi exposure, jailbreaking, etc.)

Testing Considerations Must test for varying bandwidth conditions

Must test on actual devices—especially Android

Must test on multiple operating system versions

Android provides automated testing methods allowing unit tests

Cloud-based testing can allow for testing bandwidth at the same time

Must test the security threat model

Must test service interfaces thoroughly

The Future Cloud-based automated testing will become essential as emulator

technology advances

Device advancements should serve to actually consolidate the mobile marketplace as opposed to further fragmentation

Advancements in operating systems on mobile devices will eventually make devices servers as well as clients

Mobile payments, content streaming, and HTML5 advances (Google’s A8 JavaScript technology, etc.) will make HTML5 the application standard