Augmenting android with AOSE principles for enhanced functionality reuse in mobile applications

The Android platform has popularized and caused a widespread adoption of its application development approach based on loosely coupled application components. This loose coupling allows for a flexible composition of applications but also enables invocations and reuse of individual components from third-party applications. One problem with the original Android design is that the rather coarse-grained application components themselves prohibit more fine-grained decomposition. To provide more flexible loosely coupled components and also to foster the reuse of more elementary fine-grained functionality, we suggest the extension of Android application components with our concept of $#956;-agents. Moreover, the organisational aspects of the $#956;-agent model introduce means to structure functionality in a more systematic manner. In this article, we introduce our platform concept called Micro-agents on Android (MOA) that realizes the integration of application development principles with a lightweight notion of agency. Several scenarios are used to describe the benefit from functionality reuse across applications enabled by MOA. A performance evaluation demonstrates that $#956;-agents interact in a more efficient manner than Android services, making them well-suited for fine-grained decomposition. Our approach serves as an example showing how existing technology can benefit from utilizing the modelling advantages of agent-based technologies.