Towards a Framework for Proximity-Based Hybrid Mobile Applications

Despite the increasing availability of IoT devices and technology, the current user interaction requires users to download dedicated ad-hoc mobile apps, each of these remotely monitoring and controlling a limited set of IoT devices. In the near future, with billions of deployed IoT devices, this approach will not scale since users cannot be expected to download different apps for every place they visit or every device they interact with. To overcome such limitation, this paper presents the vision, the risks, and opportunities, of the development and deployment of future hybrid proximity services, as a paradigm shift for an intuitive interaction between users and the surrounding IoT environment. Hybrid proximity services are user-facing mobile applications developed and configured for specific locations and automatically installed on user mobile devices when the user is in their proximity and without the need of explicit download. A proximity service enabled environment can directly provide the user with the right service for the right place, and automatically instructs the user device on how to interact with the surrounding IoT devices.