A Conceptual Model for Architecting Mobile Applications

Quality attributes are essential in software architecture and they are determined by identifying the concerns of the stakeholders of a system. The concerns of constructing mobile applications (apps) are quite specific due to the characteristics of mobile devices. These concerns have not been adequately addressed in industry standards and practices. In this paper, we present a mobile app development conceptual model comprising six key concepts that impact quality. Using two case studies, we show that these interrelated concepts influence the architectural decisions of mobile apps and their tradeoffs need to be well considered. As such, we suggest that these concepts should be first class entities when designing mobile app architecture to ensure that the quality attributes are satisfied.