CSR: Small: Project T: Enabling Open Innovation in Mobile Platforms through API Virtualization

Openness is a key to innovation. Numerous areas in computer science and other disciplines have embraced openness and witnessed an explosion of new technological advances. This proposal argues that mobile platforms (such as Android and iOS) need to embrace openness as well. This is motivated by the fact that the current mobile platforms are mostly closed and do not allow third-party innovation, making it extremely difficult to introduce disruptive technologies. This can be observed easily by examining the most open mobile platform, Android. Android is regarded as an open platform since its source code is open. However, it is indeed a closed platform from the perspective of open innovation; this is because a small, independent third party has no easy way to modify the platform and distribute the modification at a large scale to end users. Only a select few, such as Google and Samsung, have the power to modify the platform and deliver it. Recognizing such a problem, this project proposes a new technique called API virtualization that enables open innovation in mobile platforms. API virtualization allows third-party developers to modify, reimplement, or customize platform APIs and deploy the modifications seamlessly. The uniqueness of the proposed technique is that it enables modifications completely at the app layer without requiring any platform-level changes. This allows practical openness---third parties can easily distribute their modifications for a platform without the need to update the entire platform. If successful, this project will produce (1) a working prototype that implements API virtualization on Android, (2) several case-study systems that leverage API virtualization and provide better functionality such as app anonymity, automatic mobile-cloud integration, and energy policy customization, and (3) a Web service where third-party developers upload their platform API modifications that end users can download and use.