Designing smart city mobile applications

The software architecture community has played a crucial role in the development of mobile software. Many of the ideas used in the design of these systems came from traditional software architecture and those ideas have contributed to mobile computing becoming ubiquitous. Mobile applications in the context of smart cities are very challenging since they need to operate within the power, processor, and capacity limitations of mobile devices, the exacting demands of life critical smart city requirements, and the constantly changing and exposed environment which may not always be trusted. Since there are no widely accepted design models for this type of software, developers must resort to primitive design decisions to meet all the needs of these applications, which takes additional time and expertise. For this reason, this study aims to investigate the design process for mobile applications in the context of smart cities. In order to address the lack of verified information about designing mobile apps, we conducted a multi-case study with 9 applications from 4 different development groups to build a grounded theory. The applications were reverse engineered to expose the architecture of each application. Based on all the data, an initial grounded theory was constructed to explain how the selected design process produces an app with the desired characteristics. The resulting theory offers explanations for how software engineering teams design mobile apps for smart cities. This knowledge will serve as a basis to further understand the phenomena and advances towards more effective design and development process definitions.