Enabling Automated, Rich, and Versatile Data Management for Android Apps with BlueMountain

Today’s mobile apps often leverage cloud services to manage their own data as well as user data, enabling many desired features such as backup and sharing. However, this comes at a cost; developers have to manually craft their logic and potentially repeat a similar process for different cloud providers. In addition, users are restricted to the design choices made by developers; for example, once a developer releases an app that uses a particular cloud service, it is impossible for a user to later customize the app and choose a different service.

In this paper, we explore the design space of an app instrumentation tool that automatically integrates cloud storage services for Android apps. Our goal is to allow developers to treat all storage operations as local operations, and automatically enable cloud features customized for individual needs of users and developers. We discuss various scenarios that can benefit from such an automated tool, challenges associated with the development of it, and our ideas to address these challenges.