Mobile Application
Trends and the Impact on Mobile Platforms
by
Aashoo Kukreja, ST-Ericsson India Pvt. Ltd
Introduction
The mobile application space is exploding. Users increasingly
turn to smartphones and tablets to consume and create
content, whether on the go or on the couch. As a result,
today's wireless mobile devices offer a wealth of applications.
Gaming, Internet browsing and video playback and recording
of CD-quality audio are considered commodities. In addition,
current mobile phones offer multiple radio transceivers
such as FM, GPS, Bluetooth and WLAN.
Major application stores such as Apple's iOS App Store
and Google Play have collections in the hundreds of thousands
of apps. You can find latest graphs at appbrain
(www.appbrain.com/stats/number-of-android-apps)
that shows Android apps in the market today and the pace
at which they are rapidly increasing.
The mobile application world continues to expand at a
breakneck pace. By 2015, market research firm In-Stat
expects app downloads to come close to eclipsing 48 billion
[1] and today apps account for 4 in every 5 US-mobile-media
minutes. [2]
In the beginning the apps were taking advantage of capabilities
available inside a mobile phone but now applications are
dictating the required capabilities of the mobile platform
solutions. The coming sections will elaborate on how some
trends we see in applications today will impact the next
generation mobile platform architectures.
II. POPULAR APPLICATION TRENDS
The current trend of the apps that are being downloaded
by the users can be grouped in the following categories:
[5]
- Entertainment
- Personalization
- Books & Reference
- Tools
- Lifestyle
- Education
- Travel & Local
- Music & Audio
|
- Business
- Sports
- News & Magazines
- Productivity
- Social
- Health & Fitness
- Communication
- Finance
|
- Media & Video
- Shopping
- Photography
- Medical
- Transportation
- Comics
- Libraries & Demo
- Weather
|
The above list is sorted based on the total number of
apps available . The appbrain
provides more statstical data on this at url www.appbrain.com/stats/android-market-app-categories
Games continue to be the most popular category of apps
for both feature phone and smartphone users alike. But,
while all categories of applications are more popular
on smartphones than on feature phones, the difference
is more pronounced in categories such as maps/navigation,
where more computing power, larger screens and touch interfaces
deliver a more satisfying experience. [6]
Designing a mobile platform that can successfully incorporate
all of these applications as well as the next generation
of applications - which will incorporate features such
as HD video, high-fidelity audio, digital SLR-like imaging
and augmented reality- is a challenge.
III. CHALLENGES FOR THE MOBILE PLATFORM
With so many new smartphones coming into the market, apps
play a major role in complementing the overall mobile
platform architecture. A way to break down the challenges
these apps provide to a mobile platform is to simply categorize
the apps being downloaded in terms of the platform architecture
needs. The areas that come out of this analysis give insights
into use cases that are evolving but also a hint of the
kind of architecture that a mobile platform solution should
be built on.
App Trends |
Platform Architecture Needs |
Gaming & Video Apps |
Powerful graphics processing, touch
responsiveness |
Productivity Apps |
High performance MPUs, cross platform portability |
Cloud Centric Apps |
Low latency data sharing, web-connectivity |
Social Networking Apps |
Fast transcoding of videos and pictures |
Object Recognition Applications |
High-end image processing |
Context Aware Applications |
Artificial intelligence |
Multi Party Conferencing Applications |
Video parallelism |
Mobile Commerce Applications |
High data security |
So next generation mobile platform solutions have to
be architected in such a way they will provide a very
good user-experience, both with the apps currently in
use and with the hundreds of thousands of apps being developed
every day.
IV. DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS
In order to meet the challenges of these use cases,
to engineer the mobile platforms for the next generation
of wireless devices, the platform must be architected
at system level, not just at chip level. Actually, this
is the way design is made already today, but it has to
be further refined.
Examples of design aspects that need to be considered
are:
1. CPU and GPU processing capabilities are at the heart
of every intelligent device. The increasing demands that
we are placing on mobile devices have brought about the
necessity for more powerful processing. Multi-core CPUs
as well as multi-core 2D/3D graphics accelerators in the
application processor are needed. Future computing architectures
will require hybrid systems combining Heterogeneous Multi
Processing and multi-core architecture.
2. Cellular and short range wireless (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth)
capabilities create the "connected device" and
building on this we have Intelligent apps that collect
data via the network, the recent uptake of cloud services
and connected applications like gaming and "live"
presence that provide a great challenge to the mobile
platform network architecture.
3. Visual capabilities become more and more important
for consumers as the smartphones are trying to fully replace
digital cameras. This calls for higher processing power
and high quality algorithms to handle various aspects
of image processing such as HDR and WDR processing, high
density pixel processing, gesture processing, TOF and
HDR Sensors. For applications like video conferencing
simultaneous parallel encoding and decoding for are essential.
The multi-core architecture-based system has to provide
adequate processing capacity for image processing and
video acceleration, feature recognition and tracking algorithms.
4. Artificial Intelligence (AI) will find its way into
the smartest of all smart devices. Recent revolutionary
advancements in apps have shown that a more intuitive,
engaging and captivating user interface will not only
improve the effectiveness of the system, but also boost
the productivity of users. Initially, this will incorporate
a fusion of sensor information across camera, sensor networks
(gyro, accelerometer, etc) and speech, emphasizing the
need for an AI and Object recognition engine.
5. High end data security on video and imaging streaming
services as well as secure access to cloud services and
multi-OS content sharing needs to be built into the system
architecture.
6. Battery life, the obvious but ever so important aspect
of a mobile platform. All this processing power comes
at a price and serious efforts are needed to make the
mobile platforms even more power efficient.
These are some of the most critical aspects. Bringing
these design aspects together, an assumption is that the
next generation mobile platform architecture will have
to comprise, if not as discrete architectural building
blocks, at least serious improvements in areas of MPU
(microprocessor), GPU (graphic processor), display processing
unit, video streaming accelerators, speech processing,
image and vision processing, sensors processing units,
low latency cloud and network processor intefaces, advanced
navigation systems interface, optimized low latency storage,
advanced security and firewalls, and power and thermal
management systems (shown in picture below).

Seeing the level of complexity each of these building
blocks imposes on the design, it becomes clear that the
level of system integration also will play a significant
role in the design effort. The more integrated the system
on both hardware and software level, the better the platform
will be in terms of performance, size, cost and power
consumption.
In our view the most competitive mobile platforms will
be ModAp solutions, combining cellular Modem, Application
processor and a multitude of intelligent hardware engines/accelerators
in one chip, by this not only fulfilling the requirements
from the app use cases, but also squeezing the size, shortening
the signal paths and lowering the battery consumption.
These are the kinds of solutions that ST-Ericsson delivers
with our NovaThor Modap platforms for smartphones
and tablets.
V. SUMMARY
This is of course just a very high level indication
of how the mobile platform architecture will evolve. What
is clear is that systematic end user application trend
studies will become even more crucial when defining the
next generation processor architecture.
VI. REFERENCES
[1]http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/study-app-downloads-to-reach-48-billion-by-2015/
[2]http://www.comscoredatamine.com/2012/05/apps-account-for-4-in-every-5-us-mobile-media-minutes/
[3]http://www.appbrain.com/stats/number-of-android-apps
[4]http://betanews.com/2011/12/07/android-market-is-unstoppable/
[5]http://mashable.com/tag/mobile-app-trends-series/
[6]http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/NielsenMobileAppsWhitepaper.pdf