Toward a Framework for the Discovery and Acquisition of Mobile Applications

Mobile application development is a field that has gone through rapid change during the past two decades. Although, in the past, the development and control of mobile devices was performed by phone manufacturers and network carriers, and development was done ‘in house’, the evolution of mobile device capabilities has expanded the potential for mobile application developers. This evolution has created four main actors in the world of mobile applications: the network carrier, the phone manufacturer, the service provider, and the application developer. The application developer must run through a gauntlet of important decisions and choices to create a successful and marketable application. In this paper we investigate and analyze the challenges mobile developers face. A framework for the aggregation of major mobile application distribution channels is introduced with the aim of providing an efficient way to locate, purchase, and download a mobile application onto a mobile device.