Effective Mobile Apps in Agriculture Focusing on Land Crop and Animal Farming towards Smart Farming *Nazma Tara, *Ganopati Roy, *Sadia Jahan Sharmi, **Kamal Ibne Sufian, ***Md. Mazharul Haq *Department of Computer Science, National University, Gazipur-1207, Bangladesh, **Delta Computer Science College, Rangpur, ***Bangladesh Bank, Bangladesh Abstract: Development in agriculture is essential to boost up the economy of Bangladesh. Several Govt. and non- govt. organizations already have taken some initiatives to ameliorate this sector by imposing the ICT where mobile communication is the most useful and applicable technology. It is noticeable that mobile applications play vital roles to exchange information among the farmers, service providers and the market people as well. Though a few number of farmers currently aware of these apps, visual and graphical information, instant problem solving by exchanging image via mail and mms, database creation, storage, all of these criteria made the apps more grantable to the people. This paper investigates 47 mobile apps in two sectors of agriculture, land crop, animal farming for the people of Bangladesh. Based on the investigation, two apps provide Internet of Things (IoT) services at present. Some tables have been provided in this paper to show the grouping of the selected apps based on their service category. Graphical visualization has also been presented to indicate the frequency of downloading of the apps and their respective ranking. Keyword: Mobile apps, smart agriculture, IOT, animal farming I. Introduction Bangladesh is a land of abounding with many rivers, fruitful trees and corn which is a mid-income country of which economic growth mostly depends on the agriculture. As of 2019, 63% of our total labor force still employed on the agri-based sector [1] and this sector comprises 13.31 of national GDP (2018-19) [1]. Less production of Agri- product, inadequate management and after all faulty marketing system are the main causes of the stagnation of agricultural sector. For long term sustainable development in this sector, the solution may come from the proper use of the ICT in agricultural-research and agricultural-expansion. In the last decades, in spite of being rigorous development in several sectors, agriculture is lagging behind many aspects, here are some causes [2]: i. Inadequate, unreliable and delayed information to the farmers ii. Poor infrastructure in agriculture iii. Disintegration of market iv. Small land holdings v. Non adoption or less adoption of improved technology vi. Long-term sustainable development plan, and so on. It has become indispensable to explore various ways to keep our farmers updated about modern technologies and relevant information to pace up them in current technological era [3]. Technological revolution has its foot-print on every part of our life, on communication to entertainment, on health issue to education, industry, even on daily routine. Therefore, with the introduction of ICT, by reforming the traditional agriculture, it is possible to uphold the productivity and sustainable development. Hence, empowering farmers with the right information at the right time and place is essential for improving the efficiency and viability in agriculture [4]. It is necessary to generate, store, disseminate, and use the information effectively by inclusion the ICT. In this way, we can ensue the prompt, reliable and locality based services. Consequently, Government of Bangladesh has recognized ICT as the mainstream development tool to lift the economic and social status of the citizens of Bangladesh under the vision 2021 [5]. Theoretically, ICT is the combination of media (print, audio, video, multimedia etc.) made possible by a common digital platform [6]. In Bangladesh, mobile phones, computers and internet, fixed-line telephony including some TV and radio channels are the main ICT supporting tools principally provided by the private sector operators. In recent years, the government also formulates and implements ICT policy successfully. In this paper, we deliberately focus on only mobile phone as ICT supporting tool. Mobile users in Bangladesh: According to GSMA, the association of mobile operators, number of mobile phone users globally will surpass five billion by the end of year 2021. The statistic shows in Bangladesh the total number of Mobile Phone subscribers has reached 165.615 Million at the end of January, 2020 [7] and there were 66.44 million internet users in Bangladesh in January 2020 [8]. Mobile phone has several advantages: are owned by billions of people, provide delivery in an instant, more convenient way, can deliver personalized information to individual owners. They are cheaper to deploy. Provide other functions such as voice communication. ICT is being applied to fight poverty, promote economic growth and support development efforts in the developing world. Most of these efforts are based on the international communication policy debates which emphasize that creating digital opportunities is not something that happens after addressing ‘core’ development challenges; it is a key component of addressing those challenges in the 21st century [6]. Mobile-apps are software designed to take advantage of mobile technology, enabling the collection and transmission of data for economic and social activities whether for commercial, administrative or entertainment purposes [10]. Example: Fosholi, Rupali, etc. There are very few research have done on ICT in agriculture in Bangladesh [11, 12, 13], especially in the view of