AnyPhone: Moblie Applications for Everyone

The mobile phone is one of the most commonly carried pieces of personal, readily accessible digital technologies. Beyond just voice calls, they function as digital cameras, PDAs, internet consoles, and email and instant messaging clients. The demand for improved operating systems and programming languages has given rise to a wide range of hardware and programming APIs. However, the designers of these mobile phone applications are continuously challenged with two inescapable aggravations: (1) how will users locate and download the application to their mobile phone and (2) will the application be compatible with their phone’s hardware? We undertook the challenge to discover the design space of mobile phone applications that required no downloading or installation procedure and would operate on any mobile phone regardless of the phone’s network, carrier, operating system, age, or hardware. We developed and deployed two such applications – Tree-Map Arrival Information and Group Voting.