Interaction between Theory and Practice in Civil Engineering and Construction Edited by Komurlu, R., Gurgun, A. P., Singh, A., and Yazdani, S. Copyright © 2016 ISEC Press ISBN: 978-0-9960437-2-4 545 MOBILE APPLICATIONS FOR THE CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY BAHADIR V. BARBAROSOGLU and DAVID ARDITI Dept of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL, USA The construction industry has been criticized as an “old-school” industry, because of being a slow adopter of mobile technologies. This has changed recently. A 2014 survey of 1,048 participants found that 72% of construction practitioners have smartphones, and use smartphone applications for work purposes. While there are thousands of smartphone applications advertised as “construction apps”, the most popular smartphone applications offered by software providers to the construction industry are for field data collection, project management, bidding, building information modeling (BIM), accounting, customer relationship management, and estimating. This paper discusses the current state of smartphone applications available to the construction industry, and examines the apps’ functions. Due to the rapid growth in the smartphone applications market, new applications become available every day for use in different industries. Given the large number of choices, both companies and individuals in the construction industry must beware when selecting and purchasing smartphone applications. The business needs of the potential users and the expectations from the applications must be well identified, and the selection must be made accordingly. Properly selecting and deploying smartphone applications for construction-related tasks is expected to improve communication, enhance workflow with real time information, and increase productivity. Keywords: Mobile apps, Smartphone apps, Construction tasks, Computerization, Construction productivity. 1 INTRODUCTION Smartphones and mobile applications that run on them have changed the world and have become a part of everyday life. As of July 2015, the total number of mobile applications available in leading mobile application stores (e.g., Google Play, Apple App Store, Amazon Appstore, Windows Phone Store, and BlackBerry World) is almost four million. The applications cover many fields and can execute a variety of tasks, but they have one main purpose, and that is to deliver a service (Krouse 2012). According to Engineering News Record (ENR) (2011), mobile devices are also changing construction management. Construction professionals use tablets and smartphones to increase job-site efficiency. Both tablets and smartphones combine mobile accessibility with mobile construction management applications, with the added advantage for smartphones that they can fit in a pocket and provide the same benefits. The main advantage gained from the use of such mobile devices is that they enable