Research in the App Store Era: Experiences from the CenceMe App Deployment on the iPhone

Smartphones and “app stores” are enabling the distribution of a wide variety of third party applications to very large numbers of people around the globe in an instance with the potential to collect rich, large-scale data sets. This new era represents a game changer for our research community one which we are still trying to best understand and exploit. We discuss our experiences in developing, distributing and supporting CenceMe, a personal sensing application for mobile social networks, developed for the Apple iPhone and first released when the Apple App Store opened in 2008. We had to come to terms with supporting a fairly complex real-time sensing application outside the normal controlled laboratory setting. Instead of deploying the CenceMe application to a small set of local users (e.g., 30+ users when we first deployed CenceMe on Nokia N95s in 2007) we had to deal with thousands of users distributed around the world. This new era of app development and distribution at scale is an exciting one for researchers one that will accelerate the deployment of new ideas and likely lead to new advances and breakthroughs not well understood today. Author