An app streaming software could reduce the space taken up by the applications on your smartphone.
Over the years, phone manufacturers have had to increase the storage capacity of their devices. At the beginning of the decade, the standard onboard storage was 8 to 16 gigabytes.
Today, phones have as much as 500 gigabytes to 1 terabyte of storage.
Regardless of how ample the storage space may be, it could still get full. Then we have to resort to deleting apps to free up as much space as we can.
Now there’s a solution.
The researchers from Purdue University have developed an app streaming software to address the storage issue. And they’re calling it AppStreamer.
A Purdue University professor of electrical and computer engineering, and computer science, Saurabh Bagchi explained:
“It’s like how Netflix movies aren’t actually stored on a computer. They are streamed to you as you are watching them
The software streams data and code resources from a cloud server to an app when necessary. That way, the phone application would only use the space it needs at any given time.
In the end, AppStreamer could reduce storage requirements for popular gaming Android apps by 85 percent.
So, how does it work?
Using App Streaming Software For Gaming on Smartphones
AppStreamer is a middleware — located between the device and the operating system. It automatically predicts when to fetch data from a cloud server.
In a test, the software shuffled data between a gaming app and a cloud server without any lag. According to the researchers, the data transfer was so seamless that study participants didn’t notice any difference in the gaming experience.
While the researchers tested AppStreamer using storage-hungry games, the app streaming software can work with other apps. It could also enable the app to download faster into a phone.
AppStreamer is designed to work with the next-generation mobile network, 5G. Not only would this lead to instant downloads, but apps would also run faster and take up less space.
The software also works on edge computing, which stores and sends data from servers.
The researchers pointed out that AppStreamer’s potential application extends beyond smartphones.
For example, the middleware could allow autonomous vehicles to pull data from remote servers. This would ultimately lead to cars that respond swiftly to their surroundings.
AT&T and the National Science Foundation supported the research.
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