Conquering the Mobile Device Jungle: Towards a Taxonomy for App-Enabled Devices

Rieger Christoph, Majchrzak Tim

Abstract
Applications for mobile devices (apps) have created an ecosystem that facilitated a trend towards task-oriented, interoperable software. Following smartphones and tablets, many further kinds of devices became (and still become) app-enabled. Examples for this trend are smart TVs and cars. Additionally, new types of devices have appeared, such as Wearables. App-enabled devices typically share some characteristics, and many ways exist to develop for them. So far for smartphones and tablets alone, issues such as device fragmentation are discussed and technology for cross-platform development is scrutinized. Increasingly, app-enabled devices appear to be a jungle: It becomes harder to keep the overview, to distinguish and categorize devices, and to investigate similarities and differences. We, thus, set out with this position paper to close this gap. In our view, a taxonomy for app-enabled devices is required. This paper presents the first steps towards this taxonomy and thereby invites for discussion.