UNIVERSITY EXAMINATION 2020/2021

YEAR 3 SEMESTER I EXAMINATION FOR THE DEGREE OF BACHELOR OF

SCIENCE IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

SPI 2304: MOBILE APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT

DATE: Tuesday, 25th May,2021 TIME: 8.30am – 10.30 am

INSTRUCTION: Answer Question one (compulsory) and any other TWO questions
QUESTION ONE (30 MARKS)
a) XYZ Company intends to design a new mobile application to be used to assist
in to help out reach more customers for their products.
i) Explain two frameworks and tool that they may use to develop the mobile
application (4 marks)
ii) Describe 3 design issues that should be considered during the development
of the mobile application (3 marks)
iii) Explain three technical challenges faced by mobile devices in XYZ Company
(3 marks)
b) Web app development involves coding application that is hosted in web browsers.
Write a simple XML string resource file code to display the string " I Love Coding"
on a mobile phone browser (2 marks)
c) When programmers are developing mobile applications they ought to follow certain
rules.. Discuss two rules that developer must follow when writing multithreaded
android applications (2 marks)
d) Explain 2 network protocol for mobile apps that offers a higher security level while
consuming less bandwidth than HTTPS. (2 marks)
e) Touch screens are vital components of smartphone. Touch screens recognize where
on the screen you have placed your finer or stylus and communicate the co-ordinates
to the CPU accordingly. Discuss two popular types of touch screens (4 marks)

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f) Explain the following features of Edit Text widgets as used in Android mobile
application development
i. android: id ="@ +id/txtEmpName" (2 marks)
ii. android : password = "false" (2 marks)
g) Write a JQuery code that displays two buttons from selectbox (4 marks)
h) The Android package kit is the package file format used by the Android operating
system, and a number of other Android-based operating systems for distribution
and installation of mobile apps. Describe two security features found in the android
package kit (2 marks)

QUESTION TWO (20 MARKS)

a) Your company provides a news massaging app that includes a notification feature
for displaying breaking news. The notifications have deep linking to the relevant
online news pages. Recently, some users of the app complained about experiencing
delays with the display of the news notifications, while at other times, the expected
notifications were not displayed at all. The root cause of this defect was identified by
the developers and fixed. In your role as a mobile tester, which functional tests would
you undertake in order to validate that the fixed version of the app is correctly working?
(5 marks)
The window below represents a mobile application login screen.

Username
Password
Login

b) Write an XML code to create the above window (6 marks)

c) Describe two uses of breakpoint in context of mobile programming (4 marks)
d) Mobile programmers should adhere to various principles while designing a secure
mobile app. Discuss five of them (5 marks)

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QUESTION THREE (20 MARKS)
a. The UI of mobile apps should: consider users' limited attention, minimize keystrokes,
and be task oriented with a minimum set of functions. This functionality is supported
by Mobile enterprise application platforms or integrated development environments
(IDES).
i) Discuss Four software requirements you will need to set up a mobile
app programming environment (4 marks)
ii) Outline four integrated development environments (IDES) that can
be used to develop a mobile application (4 marks)
iii) Explain three types of layouts that can be used to develop an android
app (6 marks)
b. Describe three areas of consideration when designing the right user interface for
mobile application (6 marks)

QUESTION FOUR (20 MARKS)

a) A company is considering developing a mobile app for its operation. The mobile
development advises the management to create an android app instead of iOS
application. Giving reasons, support the advice of the mobile development team (4 marks)
b) Company A uses mobile application development to develop their apps while
company B uses web application development. Discuss the benefits that Company
A has over Company B (4 marks)
c) As part of the development process, Mobile User Interface (UI) Design is also an
essential in the creation of mobile apps. Discuss three ways that user interface
tool kit provides user interface that is easy to use (6 Marks)
d) Explain two ways in which data synchronization can be performed in mobile devices
and two data synchronization mechanisms in which mobile apps should address (6 marks)

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 QUESTION FIVE (20 MARKS)
Study the android code below

a) Giving reason justify which of the two is an implicit and which is an explicit
intent. (4 marks)
b) The following is part of an example of android manifest file

i) Outline two tasks performed by the android manifest file (4 marks)

ii) Highlight the other 3 elements of a android manifest file (4 marks)
c) Write code in Android programming to perform the following tasks
i) Create a bundle object. (4 marks)
ii) Put data in the created object of type integer. (4 marks)

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