Design Patterns for Mobile Devices - A Comparative Study of Mobile Design Patterns using Android

Design patterns in software engineering is a useful concept for developers to solve a software design problem in a specific context. With the advent of mobile devices and mobile application development, the demand for complicated software running on mobile devices, varying in size and power capabilities, has proliferated. As design patterns were initially not designed for such an environment, mobile design patterns can help overcome the limitations and challenges with mobile application development. This paper aims to develop mobile design patterns in Android by conducting a comparative study of design patterns for mobile devices and evaluating the design patterns in terms of performance efficiency and maintainability. Our end goal is to identify requirements imposed on design patterns by Android and its mobile devices. The results show that with techniques and strategies for optimized memory and power usage, mobile design patterns can improve the application in terms of performance and some aspects of maintainability. Two requirements were imposed on the design patterns. One was for the patterns having to consider incorporating components from the mobile platform architecture, in our case, Android. And secondly, having to manage and optimize limited memory and power from the mobile device