Software engineering for mobile applications, a survey on challenges and solutions

Mobile app development has become the front line in software engineering. With the recent years many smartphone platforms have grew including but not limited to webOS, blackberry os, Tizen, android, and iOS. The coexistence of these platforms results in a challenging situation where apps must be developed and maintained to the same level. The mobile app development scene has recently seen a noticeable rise in the number of applications that adapt web elements like HTML5 to produce native like applications that are essentially web views wrapped into containers to appear as any normal application. This means that the application behavior can vary drastically from one user to another meaning that the app behavior can be changed drastically. Therefore, application developers rely on an agile or an ad-hoc approach to development that is mostly autonomous. In this paper, we describe the current state of the art of context awareness in mobile application development.