LiqDroid: Towards Seamlessly Distributed Android Applications

Mobile devices have changed the way we live, but most applications are still conceived for isolated devices and do not allow the user to take advantage of the different devices (e.g., phones, cars, watches, televisions, etc.) opportunistically, efficiently, and dynamically. Multi-device interactions are currently mainly conceived as independent cooperating applications, which then require the a-priori definition of the set of communicating elements, along with the responsibility carried out by each participant. This paper tries to flip the perspective and fosters the idea of liquid, loosely coupled distributed Android applications by extending intent-based app communication, usually limited to the same device, to proximal devices. While changing the operating system would have been too expensive, the concept has been implemented through LiqDroid, a middleware that eases the creation of distributed Android applications and oversees their execution on a dynamically changing set of Android devices. Specifically, LiqDroid is an Android service that both augments each single Android device and manages their cooperation. Some example applications demonstrate the main characteristics of LiqDroid and provide interesting insights for possible future developments.