Mobile Applications: Status and Trends (guest editorial)

The packing of new technology into handsets becomes increasingly dense, turning traditional resource-constrained cell-phones into advanced audiovisual devices operating on fast, high-capacity wireless networks. Mobile software advances just as quickly with researchers and practitioners migrating from desktop-centric to smartphone-centric applications. Research in this area is driven by the all-mobile lifestyle, consumer demand and advances in hardware design and communication networks. The steady decrease of mobile data communication charges and the proliferation of devices with large screens, rich-multimedia support and builtin GPS, WiFi, sensors and compass give rise to novel mobile and nomadic applications. Mobile application developers face numerous challenges related with location and context awareness, personalization, mobile data management, porting over multiple platforms, devices’ fragmentation, etc. Service providers are responsible for application management, deployment models and middleware support. Mobile applications-relevant research currently spans a broad range of research topics, such as: middleware and distributed systems in support of mobile applications; context and location awareness; applications personalization issues; application and development platforms and runtimes; supporting toolkits, programming languages and libraries; application porting and device fragmentation issues; use of novel hardware features and sensors mounted on mobile devices; application lifecycle management and deployment models; mobile applications accessibility issues; security and privacy issues; mobile web; mobile HCI. The goal of this special issue is to explore application-layer research and development in mobile computing and solicit highquality research works outlining application development and industry status and trends. All submitted articles have considered practical applications through case studies, experiments, user evaluations and systematic comparisons with other approaches already in practice