Operating Systems for Mobile Devices - Coursework Example

Operating Systems for Mobile Table of Contents I. Introduction II. Mobile Operating Systems- Overview III. Focus on Android IV. Mobile and Desktop Operating Systems V. Operating Systems at the Top 500 References I. Introduction This paper discusses operating systems for mobile platforms from the perspective of the challenges that are unique to the OS, and from the perspective of comparing and contrasting the user experiences and structures that underlie them. The paper considers, in the process, the following and more as aspects of mobile OS’s: the installation of applications, the management of memory, issues relating to the sizes of the screens, development history, standards, issues relating to security, concurrency, systems for the management of files, and privacy (Sharma et al. 2012; Vallina-Rodriguez and Crowcroft 2012). Among the mobile operating systems relevant for this discussion are Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Ubuntu, Sailfish, Blackberry, Ubuntu, and Firefox. The paper highlights Android for discussion in the context of being able to dwell into detail on the inner workings of mobile operating systems, and in particular how Android relates to the issues and topics enumerated above. Next, the paper goes into a comparison between these mobile operating systems on the one hand and larger desktop operating systems such as Linux and Windows. The paper also goes into a discussion on the impact of mobile operating systems on desktop operating systems in terms of market share, structure, their subsequent development, the changes in hardware and strategic aspects such as battery life and programs and apps, market uptake and the like. Lastly, the paper goes into a discussion of the operating systems used in the so-called Top 500 (Bohmer et al. 2011; Khomh, Yuan and Zou 2012). II. Mobile Operating Systems- Overview When one talks about mobile computing, one talks about possibilities in terms of bringing more computing ability and power to more people on the go, but one also invariably talks about challenges and constraints inherent in the nature of mobile computing, and those relate to one, limitations in computing ability relative to bigger and non-mobile counterparts such as traditional PC computing; two, constraints in terms of power, that mobile computing is constrained by computing components that are underpowered or receive basically limited battery power that limits their portability and the way in which they are used for some vital tasks like online computing; three, that mobile computing is limited in that the way it connects to the web is variable in the speed that it is able to do so, with some scenarios where it is able to get of large telecommunication bandwidths, but in other cases not being able to get more than minimal connections in that regard; four that there are inherent risks in mobile computing, in that the devices are portable and therefore more prone to getting lost, to being stolen, or to being destroyed from use or from the elements, in comparison to their non-mobile counterparts, which can be secured in safe and guarded facilities, such as offices. One discussion frames the discussion therefore of mobile computing in terms of the inherent limits of such mobile computing on the one hand and the need to offset those constraints with more reliability, more robustness, and more scalability in terms of the elements that tie up the mobile computing devices, meaning the servers to which the mobile computing devices connect to, or the cloud in modern parlance. This latter element is beyond the scope of this paper, but the relevant aspects of the above constraints relate to the way mobile operating systems OS’s are able to deal with the constraints (Satyanarayanan n.d., pp. 1-4; Dinh et al. 2013, pp. 1587-1611). The core of this paper then is a discussion of mobile operating systems taking off from these fundamental considerations of mobile devices, and when we talk of mobile devices we are concerned primarily with their most cutting-edge incarnations in mobile smart phones powered by the most powerful mobile processors, hardware computing elements, and operating systems such as Android and Apple’s iOS (Hall 2009; Joseph and Kurian 2013). Fast-forward to 2009, from the early overviews of the power, potential and issues of mobile computing operating systems, and one gets an updated version of the concerns relating to various aspects of mobile computing that operating systems such as Symbian and Android were trying to address, and which in one way or another continue to hound modern versions of Android with the latest and more powerful hardware. Those relate to the need to develop more applications that are native to the mobile OS or platform; usability issues with the use of small screens, relating to the difficulties in the use of small interfaces that required touch, migrating from more traditional non-touch interfaces; usability issues relating to being able to type on smaller screens with touch interfaces. in comparison to more robust physical keyboards in larger desktop operating systems and keyboard-based interfaces from the likes of Blackberry and the older Nokia qwerty phones; the challenges of providing Internet surfing capabilities and other online processing capabilities that relate to communication; the need for faster connections with the use of new technologies, which was 3G in 2009, and on to more powerful and robust telecommunication platforms at present (Hall 2009; Yu 2013). More recent mobile OS issues that have come front and center in terms of importance has been the rise of issues relating to apps availability and development, and consequently of the rise of the need to develop new apps to cater to the spike in demand. Also tied to this are developments surrounding the need for mobile operating systems such as iOS and Android to rise to the occasion to provide the necessary capabilities to support app development and deployment in their respective platforms (Goadrich and Rogers 2011). II. Comparison and Contrast of Major Mobile Operating Systems The mobile operating systems market has basically been distilled into a present two-horse race between Android on the one hand, with its multitudes of mobile device manufacturers on the one hand, and Apple’s iPhone which uses iOS on the other hand. The market shares of these two major mobile operating systems, when combined, account for all but a few percentage of the total worldwide market for mobile devices, with legacy Symbian devices and Windows Phone dividing that miniscule and largely irrelevant outlier share of the market. This hegemony of the market between the two dominant mobile software platforms has implications for a comparison and contrast of the relevant aspects of mobile devices and their use as has been discussed earlier. Most importantly, these two operating systems for mobile define what is possible in many of the areas of interest in the preceding discussion, from usability, to user interfaces, to the use of internal hardware computing resources, battery life and memory management, app development and deployment, upgradability of hardware and software resources to accommodate new developments in apps and in the underlying mobile technologies for telecommunications, and the like. When one undertakes a comparison and contrast of these aspects of the twin giants, it is important to narrow down the scope and distill the differences into a set of key characteristics or areas of concern. Chief among them are apps, and other areas of interest that are key also relate to security, battery life, usability, customizability, and general market appeal (Sharma et al. 2013; Goadrich and Rogers 2011). This paper focuses on apps as a point of comparison because apps touch on the other aspects of mobile operating systems that are relevant in the preceding discussion, from computing power, which is a function of the way apps use computing power in mobile devices, to usability and user interfaces, which is a concern for apps that rely on good usability to attract users, to battery life and general likability, because of the way smart phones nowadays are after all about providing computing functionality via the aps that they make available to users, and the management of power is an integral part of all that. Therefore a comparison and contrast of the apps and nature of app development and deployment in the two major platforms gives us an idea of the kinds of potentials and issues that are inherent in mobile computing operating systems in general and in Android and iOS in particular. Going into the details of app development for both mobile OS platforms, the differences are in terms of programming languages, with iOS using Objective C and Android using Dalvik Java mainly; in terms of GUI and IDE, with Android using Eclipse and XML and iOS using XCode; development environments, with iOS restricted to Mac platforms and Android being able to make use of Windows, Linux, and Mac platforms for the development environment; and development devices, with iOS requiring Apple mobile devices such as iPhones and iPads, and Android being able to make use of a wider array of available Android devices from more manufacturers, including Nexus phones and other hardware (Goadrich and Rogers 2011). App issues are said to be more complex when it comes to Android platform devices because of the inherent variety in the devices that are supported and that are manufactured making use of Android. Even just within smartphones, the variety in terms of computing hardware, screen sizes, screen types, screen resolution and the use of all kinds of cheap and expensive components make app development and the related issues tied to app use in such a diverse hardware ecosystem for Android a tough challenge. It doesn’t help too that in Android itself, there are issues tied to the fragmentation of the platform, with various Android releases creating new and more complex problems for developers of apps in terms of making their software programs run on all iterations of Android, and on as many devices as possible (Ades 2014). Meantime, different manufacturers are likewise creating new problems by forking Android and making non-standard changes to the code, so that it becomes even more problematic for different app developers to be able to deploy their apps and programs on different versions of Android, different forked variants of Android, and different devices that make use of Android as the operating system. The same cannot be said of iOS and app development in iOS, which has a uniform platform across its narrow family of Apple devices, assuring app developers that their apps and the work that go into the app can be used across the many iterations of Apple iPhones and iPads, and that the app developers will not have to worry about their apps not working on a great number of permutations of screen sizes, screen resolutions, computing hardware internals, memory internals, memory management capabilities, battery life ratings, and the like (Stewart 2012; Heitkotter et al. 2012). III. Focus on Android As discussed above the nuts and bolts of Android app development give us an indication of the kinds of potentials and problems that are tied to the mobile platform, in the context of the underlying structures of the mobile operating system as well as in the context of the way the operating system has been deployed across a fantastic array of mobile computing devices, from smartphones to tablets of all shapes and sizes as well as hardware configurations. In terms of development environment, programming languages, IDE and user interfaces development, as discussed earlier, the primary development platforms are Windows, Unix and Mac, while the primary programming language is Dalvik Java, XML and Eclipse (Goadrich and Rogers 2011). On the other hand, beyond the basics of that programming and development environment, it is the actual use cases and the complex and dynamic developments in the mobile operating platform itself that is causing problems. Those problems touch on usability, the management of internal resources, the management of battery life, interactions between users and apps and other pieces of software, and the like. All these issues are well-encapsulated in the practical issues and problems tied to app development and deployment in Android. As earlier discussed, within Android itself there is massive fragmentation. The official Android iterates with new version releases that pose problems for backward compatibility of apps. Two, Android itself is being forked by several manufacturers, posing problems for apps that need to work across different forked versions of the mobile operating system and across different devices. Where an app developer for instance needs to reach a sizable market of users of phones with forked versions of Android, that developer will have to port their app software, often with a lot of effort. That effort becomes large and unwieldy when one considers moreover the different hardware configurations of many kinds of devices that use many versions and many forked variants of Android. The immensity of the problem therefore exponentially increases through time (Ades 2014; Heitkotter et al. 2012). IV. Mobile and Desktop Operating Systems In the main the arrival of mobile operating systems has heralded a sea change in general computing, relegating desktop computing systems to sometimes a secondary role for large swaths of populations and markets all over the world that have come to recognize mobile devices as primary computing vices and primary devices for accessing the Internet. On the other hand, this has also resulted in desktop operating systems morphing in the direction of being able to slowly offer functionalities and benefits that used to be the sole province of mobile devices, including longer battery lives and the provision of more mobile apps and services. This has been aided by advances in desktop computing hardware, in the power management capabilities of desktop processors for instance, that have allowed desktop operating systems from Ubuntu to Windows to Mac OS to leverage those gains to offer more functionality at a fraction of power use to more users, and to markets that have come to prefer mobile. The observation since at least 2012 is that desktop operating systems have been morphing to such an extent that desktop PCs are fast morphing into smart phones. In other words, the advance of mobile operating systems like Android has given impetus to Windows and the others to become more and more like Android in being portable and in lending themselves to being used effectively as mobile operating systems as well (Chacos 2013). V. Operating Systems at the Top 500 The literature on supercomputers state that as of 2014, Linux has come to dominate in terms of the operating system in use in most of the supercomputers in the top 500. As of the middle of 2014, Linux was in use in all of the top 10 supercomputers in the world, including the supercomputing number 1 bet from China, and was in use in all but three percent of all the supercomputers in the top 500 list. Of the remaining three percent, only two machines used Microsoft Windows, while 12 used proprietary Unix. The literature also notes that moving forward, the dominance of Linux is set to further increase, as computing moves to even higher measures of flops. Linux is set to set the bar even higher in terms of being able to accommodate higher levels of supercomputing moving forward, and its total dominance is an indication that it has become the standard in supercomputing operating systems (Noyes 2014). 1 References Ades, L. (2014). Android Fragmentation: Protecting the Gene Pool by Better Knowing It. Tufts University. [online]. Available at: http://tuftsdev.github.io/DefenseOfTheDarkArts/students_works/final_project/fall2014/lades.pdf [accessed 3/24/2015]. 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