Extended Intent Mechanism for Increasing Code Reusability of Android Applications

A novel ecosystem surrounding developing, publishing and using of smartphone applications is driving a new paradigm in software industry. Thousands of applications are newly published on appstores everyday. However more than 97% of them happen to be downloaded less than 1,000 times and resultingly disappeared out of user's interesting. It means that so many efforts and time of developers are vanished. In this paper, we proposed a new architecture to increase code reusability of Android applications so that the time and efforts to develop new applications can be shortened. The proposed architecture, an extended Intent mechanism, supports sharing of Android components among the applications registered in different servers as well as in the same Android device. We designed a new Intent mechanism by extending the PackageManager service and by adopting a new class for ServerPackageManager service.