AbstractsComputer Science

AIC- the Android and iOS app explorer with comparison

by Harini Chilamantula




Institution: California State University – Sacramento
Department: Computer Science
Degree: MS
Year: 2015
Keywords: Snowflake schema Data mart application; iPhone and Android application comparison
Record ID: 2059717
Full text PDF: http://hdl.handle.net/10211.3/138781


Abstract

With the advent of mobile revolution after the introduction of IPhone in 2007, the momentum in smartphone adoption has been extraordinary. Later, the availability of Android OS based phones, at different price levels, further accelerated the smartphone revolution. Most important factor of the smartphone success is the availability of applications, which exploited the hardware & OS features of smartphones and provided the capabilities that consumers never thought of. App stores (introduced by Apple and Google) are the repository of validated, reliable and secure applications available for the consumers to download and use. This mobile revolution resulted in more than 3 million applications, to date, for the consumers to choose from. Choosing applications from such a humongous number of applications is quite overwhelming and daunting task for the consumers. It may result in lack of consumer interest in new applications and eventually stifle the software innovation. AIC project solves a few of these problems by providing up to date and top ranking applications for the consumers to review and analyze. Further, this application provides both Android and IPhone applications in one place so user can evaluate the applications before buying their next phone. This tool can be used to analyze multiple applications and provide detailed analytics which are useful for both consumer and developer community. Another aim of this project is to demonstrate real life application of data warehousing techniques and how these techniques solve some of the complex problems in a elegant way. The application has a three-tier architecture as (1) Presentation layer (2) Application layer (3) Data layer. The tool presents web interface for the users to choose their favorite store, category and application. Application layer on the server processes the request. In data layer, the data is sourced from Apple???s App Store and Google???s Play Store with the help of APIs. Later extracted data is analyzed based on user request. The results are presented in a rich UI such as graphs and tables. This project involves web UI rendering, request processing, data analysis and comparison, API query generation, data collection and preprocessing, data transformation, data mart design, generating charts and tables etc. Various technologies such as PHP, HTML, JavaScript, JQuery, and MySQL are used in implementation of the project.