A-Mash: Providing Single-App Illusion for Multi-App Use through User-centric UI Mashup

Sunjae Lee, Hoyoung Kim, Sijung Kim, Sangwook Lee, Hyosu Kim, Jean Young Song, Steven Y. Ko, Sangeun Oh, Insik Shin

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Mobile apps offer a variety of features that greatly enhance user experience. However, users still often find it difficult to use mobile apps in the way they want. For example, it is not easy to use multiple apps simultaneously on a small screen of a smartphone. In this paper, we present A-Mash, a mobile platform that aims to simplify the way of interacting with multiple apps concurrently to the level of using a single app only. A key feature of A-Mash is that users can mash up the UIs of different existing mobile apps on a single screen according to their preferences. To this end, A-Mash 1) extracts UIs from unmodified existing apps (dynamic UI extraction) and 2) embeds extracted UIs from different apps into a single wrapper app (cross-process UI embedding), while 3) making all these processes hidden from the users (transparent execution environment). To the best of our knowledge, A-Mash is the first work to enable UIs of different unmodified legacy apps to seamlessly integrate and synchronize on a single screen, providing an illusion as if they were developed as a single app. A-Mash offers great potential for a number of useful usage scenarios. For instance, a user can mashup UIs of different IoT administration apps to create an all-in-one IoT device controller or one can mashup today's headlines from different news and magazine apps to craft one's own news headline collection. In addition, A-Mash can be extended to an AR space, in which users can map UI elements of different mobile apps to physical objects inside their AR scenes. Our evaluation of the A-Mash prototype implemented in Android OS demonstrates that A-Mash successfully supports the mashup of various existing mobile apps with little or no performance bottleneck. We also conducted in-depth user studies to assess the effectiveness of the A-Mash in real-world use cases.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationACM MobiCom 2022 - Proceedings of the 2022 28th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages690-702
Number of pages13
ISBN (Electronic)9781450391818
DOIs
StatePublished - 14 Oct 2022
Event28th ACM Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, MobiCom 2022 - Sydney, Australia
Duration: 17 Oct 220221 Oct 2202

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, MOBICOM

Conference

Conference28th ACM Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, MobiCom 2022
Country/TerritoryAustralia
CitySydney
Period17/10/0221/10/02

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 ACM.

Keywords

  • mobile platform
  • multi app execution
  • multi-App single-screen
  • multi-Tasking
  • user interface mashup

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'A-Mash: Providing Single-App Illusion for Multi-App Use through User-centric UI Mashup'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this