Future Trends in Software Engineering Research for Mobile Apps

TLDR

Mobile device usage has surged, leading to millions of apps and hundreds of thousands of developers, which has spurred extensive software engineering research focused on mobile app development. This paper surveys current and future research trends across the mobile app software development life‑cycle, from requirements to maintenance. The authors analyze energy, security, and monetization topics by reviewing recent advances, identifying challenges, and outlining future opportunities and risks across each SDLC stage.

Abstract

There has been tremendous growth in the use of mobile devices over the last few years. This growth has fueled the development of millions of software applications for these mobile devices often called as 'apps'. Current estimates indicate that there are hundreds of thousands of mobile app developers. As a result, in recent years, there has been an increasing amount of software engineering research conducted on mobile apps to help such mobile app developers. In this paper, we discuss current and future research trends within the framework of the various stages in the software development life-cycle: requirements (including non-functional), design and development, testing, and maintenance. While there are several non-functional requirements, we focus on the topics of energy and security in our paper, since mobile apps are not necessarily built by large companies that can afford to get experts for solving these two topics. For the same reason we also discuss the monetizing aspects of a mobile app at the end of the paper. For each topic of interest, we first present the recent advances done in these stages and then we present the challenges present in current work, followed by the future opportunities and the risks present in pursuing such research.