Appification of web applications: Architectural aspects

Proliferation of smartphones/tablets and the apps for these devices has witnessed rapid growth in recent years. One major impact of this growth has been a trend for appification of web applications. In existing literature, there is inadequate treatment of the subject, particularly from architecture and design perspective. Modern smartphones allow apps to be much more rich and address more complex scenarios as compared to earlier generation of mobile apps. As such, the architectural clarity of different appification aspects has become critical for the overall success of such systems. Major architectural difference between a regular web application and its appified avatar is that in appified scenario, it is designed to harness smartphone or tablet's capabilities. In this paper we investigate the architectural aspects of appifying web applications. We consider the layered architecture of browser accessed web applications and bring out the possible appification architectures for it. We determine which non-functional quality attributes (QA) get impacted by appifying different components/layers. Quantitative analysis of appifying a popular public web application shows a potential for savings as much energy daily as yearly needed by 45 households!