UNIT V 

MOBILE PLATFORMS AND APPLICATIONS

5.1 Mobile Device Operating Systems

Grown user needs and technology plays vital role in a development of
internet and depended systems.
 Smartphones are essential requirement that is targeted to every user must
have access to day to day things in technology.
 Two types of phones:
 Feature phone - earlier generation phones, with button-based input and a
small display
 Smart phone
 Smartphone requires an operating system and it must have some
responsibilities too.
 A mobile operating system, also called a mobile OS, is an operating system
that is specifically designed to run on mobile devices such as mobile phones,
Smartphone, PDAs, tablet computers and other handheld devices.
 The mobile operating system is the software platform on top of which other
programs, called application programs, can run on mobile devices.
Operating System Responsibilities
 Managing Resources
 OS must manage multiple devices such as Processor, RAM, Storage,
Camera, Speaker, Keyboard and Screen.
 Providing Different Interface
 OS must able to handle Interactive interface as well network interface.
 Must able communicate with mobile network at the same time it must
interact with user too.
Mobile OS
 OS must have 2 parts Kernel and Shell.
 Kernel is core that actually interacts with hardware.
 Kernel Types:
(a) Monolithic Kernel –
 Example: Unix, Windows
 The Kernel essentially constitutes the entire OS code, except for the
code for the shell.
 (+) Run more securely & efficiently.
 (-) Makes the kernel massive, non-modular,
 (-) Hard to tailor, maintain, extend & configure.

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(b) Microkernel –
 Tries to minimize the size of the kernel code.
 Most mobile OS based on the microkernel design.
 Only the basic hardware-depended functionalities & a few critical
functionalities are implemented in the kernel mode & all other
functionalities are implemented in the user mode
 (+) Easier to port, extend & maintain the OS code.

Basis for Microkernel Monolithic Kernel

comparison
Size Smaller in size Larger than
microkernel
Execution Slow in execution Fast execution
Extendible Easily extendible Hard to extend
Security If a service crashes, it If a service crashes,
does effects on working on the whole system
the microkernel crashes in monolithic
kernel
Code To write a microkernel To write a monolithic
more code is required kernel less code is
required
Example Most mobile OS based on Unix, Windows
the microkernel design.

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5.2 Special Constraints and Requirements of Mobile O/S
(a) Special Constraints
 Limited Memory.
 Limited Screen Size.
 Miniature keyboard.
 Limited processing power.
 Limited battery power.
 Limited and fluctuating bandwidth of the wireless medium.
i) Limited memory
 A mobile device usually has much less permanent & volatile storage compared
to that of desktop or laptop.
 To deal with the limited memory of a mobile device, OS must small as much
as possible & yet provide rich user functionalities to meet user demands.
ii) Limited Screen Size
 Size of mobile must be small and portable.
 This limits the size of the display screen.
 New innovative user interface is needed to overcome this constraint &
minimize the user inconveniences.
iii) Miniature KeyBoard
 Mobile handsets are either provided with a small keypad or the small-sized
display screen is used as a keyboard in a touch screen mode or by using
stylus.
 Typing is too difficult for large document creation
iv) Limited Processing Power
 Most of the modern mobile devices incorporate ARM based processor.
 These processors are energy efficient, cheaper and powerful but it is slower
processor.
 The sizes of the on-chip & off-chip memory are also restricted.
 To deal with the restricted processing power, storage & battery power,
usually the OS is made to provide only a limited number of functionalities.
v) Limited Battery Power
 Mobile need to lightweight and portable so we need to use slim batteries.
 OS needs to be computationally efficient and to minimize the power
consumption.
vi) Limited and Fluctuating bandwidth of the wireless medium

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 Mobile OS needs to run complex protocols due to the problems caused by
mobility and wireless medium.
 A wireless medium is directly affected by noise leads to high bit-errors
rates.
 Therefore the speed of communication (Bandwidth) may fluctuate due to
noise, mobility of the node and obstacles.
 The uninterrupted communication requires a special support for data
caching, pre-fetching & integration.
(b) Special service Requirements
 Support for specific communication protocols
 Mobile device are often required to be connected to the base station &
various types of peripheral devices, computers & other mobile devices.
 The types of communication protocols used for communication with the
base station depend on the generation of communication technology (1G,
2G, 3G.....)
 For communication with other devices & with computers, TCP/IP &
wireless LAN protocols need to be supported.
 For web browsing and communication with other personal devices such as
pen drive & headphones, infrared & Bluetooth connection preferable.
 This mandates the OS to support multiple protocols & hardware
interfaces.
 Support for variety of input mechanisms
 Smartphones usually support the QWERTY keyboard. Many recent
mobile phones also support touch screen or even stylus based input
mechanisms along with the handwriting recognition capability.
 A mobile OS needs to support a variety of input mechanisms to make it
generic & usable by different manufactures of mobile devices.
 Compliance with open standards
 Smartphones come in many different shapes & sizes & have varying
screen sizes & user input capabilities.
 Therefore, the user interface & networking capabilities of a mobile OS
need to be designed keeping these diversities in view.
 Extensive library support
 The cost effective development of the third party applications requires
extensive library support by the OS.
 Support for Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

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  Traditional OS work on many processor & hardware configuration.
Therefore, general purpose IDEs such as Eclipse be used to develop
applications.
 However, mobile OS need to have their own IDE for effective software
development & good performance of the development software.

5.3 Commercial Mobile Operating Systems

a) IBM Simon 

 IBM Simon is a handheld, touch screen PDA designed by International

Business Machines (IBM), and manufactured by Mitsubishi Electric
 First personal digital assistant or PDA to include telephony features. 
 Multifunctional phone
 Features: In addition to make and receive cellular phone calls, Simon was also
able to send and receive faxes, e-mails and cellular pages.
 Applications:
 Address book
 Calendar
 Appointment Scheduler.
 Calculator
 World time clock
 Electronic notepad
 Handwritten annotations
 Standard and predictive stylus input screen keyboards

b) Palm OS (Garnet OS)

 A mobile os developed by Palm, Inc., for personal digital assistants (PDAs) in

1996.
 It was designed for ease of use with a touch screen-based graphical user
interface.

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 It is provided with a suite of basic applications for personal information
management. Later versions of the OS have been extended to support smart
phones.
 It uses the Motorola processor of 16 Mhz with 256 Kb or 512 Kb of Built in
RAM.
 Applications
 Date Book
 Address Book
 To Do List
 Memo Pad
 Features:
 Monochrome LCD Panels with Handwriting Recognition.
 Simple, single-tasking environment to allow launching of full screen
applications with a basic, common GUI set
 Monochrome or color screens with resolutions up to 480x320 pixel
 Graffiti 2 - handwriting recognition input system
 HotSync technology for data synchronization with desktop computers
 Sound playback and record capabilities
 Simple security model: Device can be locked by password, arbitrary
application records can be made private
 TCP/IP network access
 Serial port/USB, infrared, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connections
 Expansion memory card support
 Defined standard data format for personal information management
applications to store calendar, address, task and note entries, accessible
by third-party applications.

c) Symbian OS

 Developed by Nokia, Samsung, Ericsson, Panasonic.

 After the launch of android by google then symbian become open source
under Eclipse Public License (EPL).
 In 2011 nokia moves from symbian to windows phone.
 Symbian is real time, Multitasking, Pre-emptive, 32 bit OS runs on ARM
processors and it is microkernel based.
 Flavours of symbian:
 Series 60 –

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  Large sized colour screen, easy to use interface & an extensive suite
of applications make it well-suited to support advanced features such
as rich content downloading & MMS.
 Used on Nokia’s smartphones & Samsung handsets.
 UIQ (User Interface Quartz) Interface –
 Software package developed by UIQ technology for symbian OS.
 This is a GUI layer that provides capabilities to develop applications &
create user interfaces.
 Features:
 It supports communication protocols like TCP, UDP, PPP, DNS, FTP, WAP.
 It supports Bluetooth, InfraRed, USB Connectivity.
 CPU is switched to Low power mode when application is not responding an
event.
 It is optimized for Low power and memory requirements
 All Symbian programming is event based applications run by active
objects.
 Carbide is an IDE toolkit that is available for C++ development on
Symbian OS.

d) Windows Embedded Compact (Windows CE)

 OS developed by Microsoft.
 It uses the hybrid kernel. Optimized kernel runs on 1 MB of Memory.
 It was developed to be suitable for use on multiple vendor platforms.
 Evolution of windows mobile OS:
 AutoPC
 Pocket PC 2000
 Pocket PC 2002
 Windows Mobile 2003
 Windows Mobile 2003 SE
 Windows Mobile 5
 Windows Mobile 6
 Smartphone 2002
 Smartphone 2003
 Portable Media Center
 Zune and Now Windows Phone

e) Android OS

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 Mobile OS currently developed by Google, based on the Linux kernel and
designed primarily for touch screen mobile devices such as smartbphones
and tablets.
 Features
 Phone based keyboard or touch screen for input.
 Has built-in web browser that renders the web page fully.
 Easy way to develop third party applications.
 Android SDK and Eclipse.
 Provides RDBMS SQLite for data storage.
 Pre installed applications such as Gmail, Maps, Voice-Search, etc.

Android software stack

(i) Application Layer

 Basic applications: Web browser, Email client, SMS program, Maps,

calendar & contacts repository management programs
 All these applications are written in J2ME.

(ii) Application Framework

 Used to implement standard structure for apps.

 It provides the set of services that can used by developers.
 Services
 Managers (For events)
 Content providers (For accessing data)

(iii) Libraries and Runtime

 It is written in multiple languages including C and C++ and called through

JAVA interfaces.
 It includes surface managers 2D and 3D graphics, Media codecs (MP4, MP3)
an SQL database SQLite.
 It includes web browser engine called webkit.
 Runtime

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  Core libraries
 Dalvik virtual machine
 DVM converts the java code into native ARM code.
 Each Application runs as own process with own instance of Dalvik virtual
machine (DVM).

(iv) Kernel

 It is based on Linux kernel.

 Excluded native X windows of GNU.
 Android implements its own
 Device drivers
 Memory management
 Process management
 Networking functionalities
 Runs the application concurrently
 Google initially maintains the kernel code and contributed to Linux public
distribution.
 Now google no longer maintains the kernel extensions.

f) iOS (iPhone OS)

 Apple developed iOS for iPhone the direct replacement for iPod.
 It is the second most popular mobile operating system in the world by sales,
after Android.
 The iOS user interface is based on the concept of direct manipulation, using
multi-touch gestures.
 Interface control elements consist of sliders, switches, and buttons.
 Interaction with the OS includes gestures such as swipe, tap, pinch, and
reverse pinch, all of which have specific definitions within the context of the
iOS operating system and its multi-touch interface.
 Internal accelerometers are used by some applications to respond to shaking
the device or rotating it in three dimensions.

g) Blackberry OS

 It is a proprietary operating system designed for blackberry smart phones

produced by Research In Motion Limited (RIM).
 Architecture of blackberry OS is not revealed.

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 It has a very good email system at user level.
 It supports instant mailing while maintaining high level of security through
on-device hardware based message encryption.

5.4 Software Development Kits

A software development kit (SDK) is typically a set of software development

tools that allows the creation of applications for a certain software package,
software framework, hardware platform, computer system, video game console,
operating system, or similar development platform.
(a) Android SDK
(b) iOS SDK

(i) Android SDK

 The Android SDK (software development kit) is a set of development tools
used to develop applications for Android platform.
 The Android SDK includes the following:
 Required libraries
 Debugger
 An emulator
 Relevant documentation for the Android application program interfaces
(APIs)
 Sample source code
 Tutorials for the Android OS
 Package Contains
 Android SDK, IDE for development (Eclipse or Android Studio)
 Virtual Machine Manager and System Images to Boot the emulators.
 Tools to debug the apps during developments.
 Builders for Development (Ant for Eclipse and Gradle for Android
Studio).
 Android Application Components
 Activity - An activity is a class that is considered as an entry point for
users that represents a single screen. Example: A messenger application
might have an activity that shows a new notification, another activity
which reads messages and another which composes a new message.
 Services - A service is a component that runs in the background, it acts
as an invisible worker of our application. It keeps updating data sources
and activities.

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  Broadcast receivers - Broadcast Receiver is a component that responds
to broadcast messages from another application or the same system. It
can also deliver broadcasts to applications that are not
running. Example: notify the user that the battery is low
(ii) iOS SDK
 Developed by Apple Inc.
 Allows for the development of mobile apps on Apple's iOS operating system.
 Package contains
 Development IDE.
 Iphone Simulator.
 Applications written in Swift and Objective - C.
 Some elements of application developed using C and C++.
 The SDK contents are separated into the following sets:

(i) Cocoa Touch

 Multi-touch events and controls

 Accelerometer support
 View hierarchy
 Localization
 Camera support

(ii) Media

 OpenAL
 Audio mixing and recording
 Video playback
 Image file formats
 Quartz
 Core Animation
 OpenGL ES

(iii) Core Services

 Networking
 Embedded SQLite database
 Core Location
 Threads
 CoreMotion

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 (iv) Mac OS X Kernel

 TCP/IP
 Sockets
 Power management
 File system
 Security

5.5 M-Commerce (Mobile Commerce)

M-commerce (mobile commerce) is the buying and selling of goods and services
through wireless handheld devices such as cellular telephone and personal
digital assistants (PDAs). Known as next-generation e-commerce, m-commerce
enables users to access the Internet without needing to find a place to plug in.

Applications of M-Commerce

a) Business-to-Consumer Applications (B2C)

Business-to-Consumer is a form of commerce in which products or services are

sold by a business firm to a consumer.

 Advertising
 Comparison shopping
 Information about a product
 Mobile Ticketing
 Loyalty and payment service
 Interactive advertisements
 Catalogue shopping
 Advertising
 Location based advertising.

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  Purchase track will give you the information about future buy’s of same
customer.
 Comparison shopping
 Pricing analysis with different shops.
 Feature analysis with different products and brands.
 QOS can be improved by customers reviews.
 Information about a product
 Consumers can know more about what they buy.
 Pharmacy and dosage information about the trucks.
 Mobile Ticketing
 We can buy M-Tickets using credit cards.
 Purchase confirmation can be sent through SMS or e-mail.
 Train, Movie, Bus, etc.
 Loyalty and payment services
 Payback cards
 Points will be generated according to the user buy’s.
 According to points user earns they may avail special gifts
 Interactive advertisements
 Offers through the TV and Teleshopping
 Catalogue shopping
 Direct buy using direct link sent by company.

b) Business-to-Business Applications (B2B)

 Ordering and delivery confirmation

 Mobile phones can be used by the dealers to order products.
 Mobile phones can be used to gather information about the status of
consignments during the transport and delivery process.
 Realtime consignment tracking.
 Stock tracking and control
 Mobile tracking can be connected with inventory of store.
 It can track warehouse status.
 Supply Chain Management (SCM).
 Mobile inventory management.

5.6 Structure of Mobile Commerce

 Normally mobile applications consists of,

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  Server-side program.
 Client-side program.
 Client-side programs gives the nice user interface to the user.
 Server-side programs gives,
 Accessing the database.
 Computations.
 Server-side programs resides on remote host computers.

i) Mobile Devices

 It provides the user interface to user and moves the data from device to
internet and vice versa.
 Feature required
 Good internet connectivity,
 Ability to display rich content like images.
 Equipped with good quality of camera with autofocus.
 Screen should display the bar codes properly.
 Ability to read RFID tags.
 SMS, MMS capability to send and receive.
 Ability to communicate between mobile devices and supporting networks.
 Ability to scan the bar codes.
 Ability to interact with the Point-of-Sale (PoS) terminals.

ii) Mobile middleware

 It is used to map the internet content to mobile phones.

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  It mostly handles the encryption and decryption in communication.
 It provides the secure transactions.

iii) Network

 It gives the access to the mobile through the wireless medium.

 Clients are connected through wireless networks.
 Host is connected to wired networks.
 Both are have the access to basic security functionalities.

iv) Host Computers

 It is servers that executes the server-side mobile applications.

 It consists of,
 Web servers, Database servers, Applications programs and support
softwares

5.7 Mobile Commerce Pros & cons

 Advantages of M-Commerce
 For business organization, the benefits of using M-Commerce include,
 Customer convenience
 Cost savings
 New business opportunities.
 From the customer's perspective,
 M-Commerce provides the flexibility of anytime, anywhere shopping
using lightweight devices.
 The customer can save substantial time compared to visiting several
stores for identifying the right product at the lowest price.
 Mobile devices can be highly personalized, thereby providing an additional
level of convenience to the customers.
 Repeated orders can be placed at the touch of a button.

 Disadvantages of M-Commerce
 Mobile devices do not generally offer graphics or processing power of a PC.
The users therefore constrained to use small screen and keyboard and low
resolution pictures and videos.

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 The small screens of mobile devices limit the complexity of applications. For
example, the menu choice, and text typing capability are severely
constrained.
 The underlying network imposes several types of restrictions. For example,
the available bandwidth is severely restricted, and international reach is
prohibitively expensive. Therefore, ubiquity of M-Commerce is hard to
achieve in practice.

5.8 Mobile Payment Systems

 Mobile payment (M-Payment) is defined as any payment instrument

where a mobile device is used to initiate, authorize and conform an

exchange of financial value in return for goods and services.

 Devices used for,

 Mobile phones.
 Personal Digital Assistants (PDA).

Mobile Payment Schemes

 Three popular types of M-Payment schemes are currently being used:

 Bank account based.
 Credit card based.
 Micropayment.

Each payment scheme uses customer's banking information the service provider
may charge small amount.

a) Bank account based M-payment

 The bank account number is linked to customer's mobile number.

 Customer may make a transactions with vendor, based on the Bluetooth or
wireless LAN connectivity with vendor.
 The bank account of the customer is debited and the value is credited to
the vendor’s account.
 M-Chek is linking credit or debit card with customer’s mobile number.

b) Credit card based M-Payment

 The credit card number is linked with mobile number.

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  When a customer makes a transactions with merchant, credit card is
charged and the value is added merchant’s account.

c) Micropayment

 It is intended for payment for small purchases such as vending machines.

 Mobile can connect with Bluetooth and wireless LAN connect to make
payment.

M-Commerce Security Issues

 Privacy Risks.
 Mobile devices difficult to find on the move.
 Mobile devices go online and offline frequently.
 Attacks would be very difficult to trace.
 Risk of mobile loss and theft.
 Fraud payment from stolen mobile is more difficult to track.
 Lack of any satisfactory mechanism to authenticate a particular user.

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