SAMD Apps: Install Once, Run Anywhere Instantly

Abstract

The capacity and capability of mobile devices continue to increase enabling the emergence of a wide variety of apps that are previously only possible with more powerful computing devices, such as laptops, desktops and even (cloud) servers. However, despite a rich set of resources in today's mobile devices, the platform-level support for mobile distributed computing remains limited. In this paper, we demonstrate textbf Single Application Multiple Device (SAMD), a mobile platform-level framework designed for “instant” mobile distributed computing. The idea is that the great amounts of mobile devices pervasive in today's connected world could be harnessed and managed cooperatively for a common objective, such as mobile collaboration. SAMD enables a mobile app to run its portions across multiple devices without the prior installation. We have implemented a proof-of- concept prototype of SAMD on Android and demonstrated the development of two example SAMD apps.