Cross-device integration of android apps

Abstract

Integrating apps on mobile devices into applications running on other devices is usually difficult. For instance, using a messenger on a smartphone to share a text written on a desktop computer often ends up in a cumbersome solution to transfer the text, because many applications are not designed for such scenarios. In this paper, we present an approach enabling the integration of apps running on Android devices into applications running on other devices and even other platforms. This is achieved by specifying adapters for Android apps, which map their services to a platform-independent service interface. For this purpose, we have developed a domain-specific language to ease the specification of such mappings. Our approach is applicable without the need to modify the existing Android apps providing the service. We analyzed its feasibility by implementing our approach and by specifying mappings for several popular Android apps, e.g., phone book, camera, and file explorer.