Exploring the Development of Micro-apps: A Case Study on the BlackBerry and Android Platforms

The recent meteoric rise in the use of smart phones and other mobile devices has led to a new class of applications, i.e., micro-apps, that are designed to run on devices with limited processing, memory, storage and display resources. Given the rapid succession of mobile technologies and the fierce competition, micro-app vendors need to release new features at break-neck speed, without sacrificing product quality. To understand how different mobile platforms enable such a rapid turnaround-time, this paper compares three pairs of feature-equivalent Android and Blackberry micro-apps. We do this by analyzing the micro-apps along the dimensions of source code, code dependencies and code churn. BlackBerry micro-apps are much larger and rely more on third party libraries. However, they are less susceptible to platform changes since they rely less on the underlying platform. On the other hand, Android micro-apps tend to concentrate code into fewer files and rely heavily on the Android platform. On both platforms, code churn of micro-apps is very high.