Inter-App Communication between Android Apps

Communications between mobile apps are an important aspect of mobile platforms. Android is specifically designed with inter-app communication in mind and depends on thisto provide different platform specific functionalities. Android Appscan either be designed with the help of Android SDK and using IDEs such as Android Studio or by usingabrowser based platform called AppInventor. These two development platforms provide their own technique forinter-app communication in the same platform, how everlack an established method of inter-app communication when apps are developed using the two seperate development platforms. This paper provides the missing information required for the app communications and presents the method for sending and receiving argumentsbetween apps developed in these two platforms. The paper also outlinesthe significance of theresult,andexaminestheir limitations.Code shoppy

Applications (apps) in Android can be developed using either MIT’s App Inventor 2 (AI) [3]or by using IDEs such as Android Studio (AS) [1]with the help of Android SDK. MIT’s AIis the second version of the Google’s original App Inventor, whichis a web browser based development environment forasimplerway to develop android apps. With little to no knowledge of programming,one can developand deployan android appusing AI.However, this simplicity comes at aprice;AI does not provide all of Android’s advanced features and most apps developed in AI have to follow a specific design template.To accessallof Android’s features, one needs to develop apps using tools such as Android Studio, which is provided by Google as a full-fledgeddevelopment environment for Android development, debugging, testing, and packaging. While communications between any two Android appsdeveloped in either AI or AS arefairly straightforward; apps developed by these two development platformseparately do not have a similarway to communicatewith each other. To define the problem, supposewe have two AI apps AI1and AI2,along with two AS apps AS1, AS2. Now also consider, P1is the process through which AI1communicateswith AI2and P2is the process through which AS1communicateswith AS2. Then it is known that P1 ≠P2.This resultsinno established process, Px, that will allow apps developed by AS tocommunicate with apps developed by AI. This paper will present thisprocess Px, which will allow apps developed in two different platforms to communicate with each other programmatically.Obvious questions arise,asto why we need to generate this process given that AI apps do not have advanced features. Since AI provides faster lead time in developing apps thanAS, having a backend system developed by AS on which AI appscan run,wouldgive developers afaster way of developing new app ecosystems. One such situation is presented below.Since 2013, Winston-Salem State University has begun implementing a MobileResponse System (MRS) [4]-[6]. MRSis a mobile learning environment that enhances class room engagement by creating a responsive environment where students solve problems in an interactive way that communicates solutions directly and immediately to their instructor. This is performed through Android poweredmobile devices, which have interactive activities in which students learn principles of their subject with immediate feedback.Thismobile platform is used by the faculty todevelop their own interactive activitiesto be used in the classroom.However, currently, such interactiveactivities must be developed by AS to be usedwith MRS. One way to alleviate this problem is to allowtheMRS to communicate with apps developed by both AI and AS. That way, interactive apps developed by faculty from other disciplines usingAI can utilizeMRS to deploy their activities in the clasSending a String fromanASapp to an AIapprequires an intent, withthe presetextrakey of “APP_INVENTOR_START”which the AI application will recognizeas the extra value. The challengeis tofind the qualified name of the AI app that we like to initiate. Normally for AS apps, the name of the Java package concatenated with the class name of the app activityis the qualified name to locate an app in the device. However, there were no such identifiable naming convention for AI apps,as no one can see the source code. With the help of the Android Debug Bridge[2],we identified that AI apps has the following qualified naming convention for their apps.