Engineering Responsive Mobile Applications for Android from Reusable Building Blocks

Abstract

This report describes the continued design and development of an instant voice communication application for Android, with specific focus on creating a highly responsive, stable application that is intuitive to use and integrates well with the Android environment. Existing building blocks have been redesigned with cleaner layouts and smaller state spaces, and new reusable blocks have been added. Techniques and principles for optimizing an application for responsiveness will be presented, along with specific measures for Android and Arctis. Another goal has been to create the first Arctis application to be released on the Android market.As a part of the design process, we have researched the development of Android services in Arctis. All service implementation variants have been examined, and the available patterns for communicating between a foreground activity and a background service have been analyzed and compared. The result is a general development methodology for creating a single Android application from two Arctis system models representing a background service and a foreground user interface, with the necessary Arctis modifications included.