CHAPTER II REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE AND STUDIES
Review of Related Literature With the introduction of low-cost smartphones, mobile computing is seen to dominate the Philippine market. A recent press release by the International Data Corporation showed the Philippines’ smartphone penetration is at 15.0% (Choong, 2015). This figure is expected to rise in two to three years. A figure like that is a clear sign for app developers to develop and sell apps to the country. Smartphones are cellular phones that performs many of the functions of a computer, typically having a touchscreen interface, Internet access, and an operating system capable of running downloaded applications. These enabled smartphone owners to go “mobile”, or to do work or personal online stuff on-the-go rather than on the office or at home. The current mobile operating systems popular today are Android™, iOS, and Windows Phone among others.
Android™ is an open source software stack for a wide range of mobile devices and a corresponding open source project led by Google (Google, 2015) and has dominated the smartphone OS market with 78.0% market share (International Data Corporation, 2015). It’s opensource nature and its large cut of the market share translates to more potential users for app developers. On the other hand, iOS is a mobile operating system developed for the solely for use by iPhone and iPad devices by Apple Inc. Applications or Apps developed for the Android Platform must are sent to Google through Google Play, the official app store of the Android Platform owned and developed by Google.
Not long ago, phones are dumb. Their only purpose is to receive and send texts messages also, to initiate and receive phone calls. With the introduction of smartphones, these devices are now able to increase user experience and productivity through apps. Phones are now portable computers. This idea gained tremendous attention from developers, companies, and even educators. “Mobile learning (often “m-learning”) is in itself not new, but new devices with enhanced capabilities have dramatically increased the interest level, including among language educators.” (Godwin-Jones, 2011).
Review of Related Studies Foreign The mobile arena is fought by numerous OS today namely, Microsoft’s Windows Phone, Nokia’s Symbian OS, Blackberry’s BlackBerryOS, but are dominated by the two most popular Operating Systems today, Android™ and iOS. Android is an open-source operating system developed by Google, and iOS, the mobile operating system developed by Apple Inc. for its iPad and iPhone devices. The study conducted by Mark H. Goadrich and Michael P. Rogers entitled “Smart Smartphone Development: iOS vs. Android” discusses the mobile space dominated by Android and iOS. iOS development requires a Macintosh computers running MacOS. These computers are built solely by Apple and have relatively high cost compared to Windows-powered and Linux-based computers. An iOS device also costs relatively higher than their Android counterparts, for example, a no-contract, 64GB iPhone 6S costs $749.00 USD or 34,221.06 Philippine Peso (10:30AM October 10, 2015 / USD 1 = PhP 45.69) if bought in the Apple US Website. The development cost of iOS apps equates to be much higher given that a beginning developer have to invest in an Apple product. On the other hand, Android can be developed using any of the current major operating systems such as Windows (XP or higher), Mac OSX (10.5.8 or higher) and Linux systems (running with kernel 2.6 or higher) (Goadrich & Rogers, 2011). With this, almost 95.34% (Net Applications.com, 2015) or almost all of desktop users can develop apps for Android. That said, the cost for developing Android apps is lower as you can use your existing compatible computer to jumpstart your Android career. In other terms, iOS development requires knowledge of Objective-C, which may not be as popular as Java which Android development uses. Also, Android has the largest market share at 78% (International Data Corporation, 2015) giving it the user base boost over iOS. It is worth to note an excerpt from the abstract from the study “Android: Changing the Landscape” which states: “The mobile phone landscape changed last year [2010] with the introduction of smart phones running Android, a platform marketed by Google. Android phones are the first credible threat to the iPhone market. Not only did Google target the same consumers as iPhone, it also aimed to win the hearts and minds of mobile application developers. On the basis of market share and the number of available apps, Android is a success.” (Butler, 2011) To sum it up, Android is much more preferable choice over iOS, considering the cost and the knowledge required to develop it but it is worth noting the elegance of developing for iOS which is the less fragmentation of its device lineup over Android.
Local Nowadays, smartphone is the most commonly used device for studying purposes. An application that has all resources they need on a single device. The purpose of this study are making an educational Android app that will allow College of Sciences students in Palawan State University to access Thesis/Research Studies of their College. De La Salle University-Taft, Manila, Philippines has an Android Application Thesis Database v1.0 developed by Kevin Jeff T. Cepria that was currently available on Google Play Store and it initially displays the information of ongoing and completed theses by CPE and ECE students of De La Salle University-Taft, Manila, Philippines from year 2010 to 2015 (Cepria, 2016) The Thesis Database allows user (1) add, edit, and delete thesis when logged in as administrator, (2) view details of thesis such as authors, panelists, chair of panelists, status adviser, academic, and etc., (3) view ongoing and completed theses by CPE and ECE students of De La Salle University-Taft, Manila, Philippines, (4) view SQLite database of Thesis (TOTAL OF 161 THESES) and (5) search option to focus on each element of a thesis.
Synthesis The app developed by Kevin Jeff T. Cepria named as Thesis Database served as a foundation to build our own app but differentiated by the approach used. In Cepria’s approach, he developed a singular use app which has no backend server. The app’s database is stored locally and the only way to update the app’s content is thru the app, which stores the data in the phone’s local storage and never synced to a server or other devices. This approach alienates other users who may wish to have updated data. In our approach, we adopted for an app with a PHP Server backend which administrator/s can use to update the content of the app that will be pushed to the application over the Internet, ensuring that once a research study is added, it will be available to the user almost instantly.
