RAC: A remote application calling framework for coordination of mobile apps

Abstract

Mobile applications (apps) have become part of our everyday life with a constantly increasing market. Of particular interest are apps aiding planning and collaboration among family members, or between co-workers. The architecture of such apps usually involves some Cloud storage medium, through which group members post and retrieve data. Naturally, all participants must have the same app installed in their devices for collaboration to be possible. In this paper we investigate an alternative option instead of app collaboration which is based on remote application calling (RAC). Under the RAC framework, a trusted source is able to invoke application actions at other people's devices, without necessarily owning himself the application it handles. We discuss RAC design and implementation related issues, focusing on Android devices. The usability of our approach is demonstrated through two widely used apps: alarm clock and map. © 2015 ACM.