Journal of Computer Networks, 2017, Vol. 4, No. 2, 65-68 Available online at http://pubs.sciepub.com/jcn/4/2/1 ©Science and Education Publishing DOI:10.12691/jcn-4-2-1 Cloud-based Storage Framework for Mobile Social Apps Abdalla Alameen * Department of Computer Science, College of Arts and Science, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University Al-Kharj, Saudi Arabia *Corresponding author: abda711su@gmail.com Abstract Smart devices using the Android system are facing memory issues because of the prolonged use of social Apps. As a result, users tend to frequently reformat their smart devices, or update them with new operating system versions. To address this problem, we propose here a cloud based storage framework for social Apps. Our proposed solution has shown promising results, and can be used by any social App to solve its storage accumulation issues. Keywords: android, memory, apps, cloud, multimedia Cite This Article: Abdalla Alameen, “Cloud-based Storage Framework for Mobile Social Apps.” Journal of Computer Networks, vol. 4, no. 2 (2017): 65-68. doi: 10.12691/jcn-4-2-1. 1. Introduction The present situation concerning the increasing use of digital devices for work, communications, and media consumption is well summarized by the fact that “Americans now own four digital devices on average, and the average U.S. consumer spends 60 hours a week consuming content across devices” [1]. Users rely on smart devices both for their personal uses and for professional work. Smartphone manufacturers are offering very user-friendly graphical interfaces for mobile applications (Apps) [2], to the point where some of the Apps in smart devices are even superior to their counterpart desktop applications. Most applications—and especially social networking sites—are now commonly available in smart devices in the form of a dedicated App. As a direct consequence of their permanent availability, these Apps are enabling users to be connected to their loved ones on a 24/7 basis. However, by continuously storing text, audio, and video messages on the device, they can eventually drain the smart device’s memory. Memory related issues can cause serious damage to the system and the installed Apps, eventually bringing the full system down. To mitigate this problem, users tend to systematically reformat the system with either the original factory images, or new operating system (OS) versions. This approach can severely penalize device owners, because some locally saved data is inevitably damaged or permanently lost, even when care is taken to move all local data to some other storage system (which typically is, in itself, a major burden to users). To avoid such situations, users are required to manually check the App’s memory usage and then dump the data into external memory. Manual probing of storage usage is not, however, a feasible solution. Therefore, in this article, we survey the memory related issues caused by the Apps’ accumulated messages—such as text, audio, and video-in the smartphone’s memory and propose a solution to avoid such problems. In particular, we are proposing a memory framework that allows social Apps to abstain from accumulating multimedia and text messages in their respective smart devices. When memory is allocated to newly created objects, the random access memory (RAM) of the Android system is shared with the other processes of the main App. RAM sharing among the processes is a direct consequence of the nature of Zygote, a daemon process at the core of the Android OS, serving as launching pad for every App present in the system. The memory framework of the Android OS is very complex and includes elements to perform the necessary garbage collection and to assess each application’s memory-related behavior. Despite that, many memory-related issues are being faced in every smart device using Android. This is mainly caused by Apps that collect data during their interaction with remote Apps or servers, and is especially so for social Apps. To avoid memory issues on Android systems, some type of standardization should be put in place. 2. Apps Android mobile OS, uses Dalvik Virtual Machine (DVM) to run apps. DVM can execute .dex files; these files are very much similar to the java jar files. DVM, optimizes the code such that it removes duplicate data entries from the class files. The multitasking is achieved because of Dalvik, which allows Android apps to run its own instances of DVM. More recently, DVM is not being used with Android; Android Runtime (ART) is used in the most recent release of Android OS. However, still user has the ability to choose the virtual machines. Dalvik uses the just in compiler, part of application will run that is compiled and while rest of the code (of the application) will be compiled later as and when needed. So hence it produces the very small memory footprints of the application and uses very less storage space. For ART based apps, their complete code will be precompiled