Mobile and Distributed Applications
Explore the key concepts of mobile applications and distributed systems. This lesson helps you understand how mobile apps interact with device features and how distributed applications utilize multiple computers to share computing power. You will also learn about peer-to-peer networks and their role in technologies like blockchain and online platforms.
We'll cover the following...
Mobile applications
When we talk about a mobile application, we usually mean a program that is designed to run on a mobile device, such as a smartphone. These devices have some special characteristics that we need to consider when writing an application.
First, their screen is smaller than a computer monitor. The screen can also be rotated into landscape or portrait orientation. We’ll also use the touchscreen of the device for input. The mobile application might also use other features of the device, such as using the GPS, sending text messages, or sensing the movement of the device using its accelerometer. These are things we usually can’t do if an application runs on a normal computer.
A mobile application can be connected, but it doesn’t have to be. Being connected means that it can communicate with another computer, maybe using the client-server techniques we discussed earlier.
When writing a mobile application, the platform that the application will run on is very important. The reason is ...