Self-Adaptation in Mobile Apps: a Systematic Literature Study

With their increase, smartphones have become more integral components of our lives but due to their mobile nature it is not possible to develop a mobile application the same way another software system would be built. In order to always provide the full service, a mobile application needs to be able to detect and deal with changes of context it may be presented with. A suitable method to achieve this goal is self-adaptation. However, as of today it is difficult to have a clear view of existing research on self-adaptation in the context of mobile applications. In this paper, we apply the systematic literature review methodology on selected peer-reviewed papers focusing on self-adaptability in the context of mobile applications. Out of 607 potentially relevant studies, we select 44 primary studies via carefully-defined exclusion and inclusion criteria. We use known modelling dimensions for self-adaptive software systems as our classification framework, which we apply to all selected primary studies. From the synthesized data we obtained, we produce an overview of the state of the art. The results of this study give a solid foundation to plan for future research and practice on engineering self-adaptive mobile applications.