Smart TV has become the dominant TV type nowadays. More and more users are switching from traditional TVs to Smart TVs. Despite the growing momentum of the smart TV industry (particularly in terms of the number of TV devices accessible in the Android ecosystem), the number of currently available TV apps is significantly less than the number of existing smartphone apps. There is an easily overlooked gap between the smartphone developers and smart TV (hereafter, TV) apps, leaving the prospect of TV apps behind the smartphone.
TV apps use the same structure as mobile apps (i.e., phones and tablets). This approach means developers can create new TV apps based on what you already know about building apps for Android or extend existing mobile apps to also run on TV devices. However, the user interaction model for TV is substantially different from phone and tablet devices. Specifically, TV apps have a considerably different design protocol than smartphone apps due to the differences in the hardware, such as screen size, computation capability, and power supply. There is still little knowledge on how smartphone apps and TV apps differ. In this research project, we are going to investigate the adaption strategy of the same feature from the existing Android Mobile apps to Android TV apps published on Google Play and develop an automatic tool for analyzing, categorizing, and adapting the functionality from Android Mobile App to Android TV App.
Student cohort
Aim/outline
1) Collect Android Phone/TV app pairs that have been published on official and/or alternative app stores.
2) Develop a static analysis tool for comparing and analyzing the Java code that implement the same functionality in Android Phone/TV apps.
URLs/references
https://developer.android.com/training/tv
Required knowledge
python programming (required), Java programming (required)
Android development (preferred), static code analysis (preferred)