Leveraging Social Network APIs for Enhancing Smartphone Apps: An Example of VoIP App

With the rapid advancement of communication technology and mobile devices, many software companies and individual developers have started to develop a variety of mobile applications. However, since the resources individual developers can get are far less than a software company, it is important for individual developers to utilize the free API resources available on the Internet to harvest the benefit of the cloud computing. This research explores the benefits that individual developers can acquire from free APIs and service-oriented computing (SOC) in building desired smartphone applications (apps). Using a VoIP application (app) as an example, the design and implementation of a smartphone app using the proposed approach is described in this article. In addition, by comparing this VoIP app with some other smartphone apps which also provide VoIP services, the advantages and potential value of our approach to integrating social network APIs and SOC concept will be discussed.