A SMS-based Application Store for Emerging Market: A Case Study

The proliferation of mobile applications for smartphones has been based on the presence of a data connection between those devices and the Internet. Therefore, users of entry-level mobile phones as well as users who cannot afford a data plan are excluded from the current dynamics of mobile applications consumption. A possible approach to include those users is the usage of SMS as the communication channel. Although SMS is widely supported by carriers and extremely popular among users, it is not trivial to replace the data connection capabilities with SMS. This work addresses this issue with an integrated solution composed by a client platform and a server-side system.This solution enables GUI-based mobile applications to be transferred over a short number of concatenated SMS-es. It also presents components for the creation, deployment and distribution of mobile applications.

Luiz Carlos A M Cavalcanti
Nokia Institute of Technology