Post-developmental activities of mobile services: Master's thesis

With the advancement of mobile technology and its growth in popularity, the mobile environment has become a more attractive environment in which to offer services that need to be taken care after their development. The purpose of this study is to examine the field of postdevelopmental activities in the mobile environment now and how it will evolve in future when its importance has grown even more. A literature study was performed to examine what kind of domain is required for postdevelopmental life cycle phases in general and what kind of major processes have to be taken into account. Another major theme for the literature study was the mobile environment, which was approached from many directions in order to define it. The focus in this defining process was to map the current state of software and hardware in the mobile environment, and to examine the service paradigms and major technologies that affect the postdevelopmental phases. For this study, seven people from across the mobile service industry were interviewed in order to get a crosssection of opinions on this subject. Of these seven interviewees, three were representatives of service providers, two were from network operating companies and two were from companies that have been customers of mobile service projects. Eleven characteristics that outline the field of postdevelopmental activities in the mobile environment were found from the literature study and the interviews. According the interviewees, the most influential problem was the incompatibility of devices, which causes many smaller problems for the postdevelopmental activities. Seven trends that are shaping the environment were also detected from the interviews.