On the challenges of building a web-based ubiquitous application platform

People use an increasing number of consumer electronic devices to access their mobile apps. To enhance the applications' immersive user experience, these devices often expose APIs for accessing a wide array of sensors and domain-specific capabilities. Existing mobile application environments, however, only provide limited support for cross-device access of such APIs. To address this limitation, the Webinos platform was designed. Webinos is a virtualized Web-based application platform, aiming to support the collaboration of multiple devices within a single mobile application. In this paper we elaborate on the Webinos platform design. We discuss the encountered design challenges regarding portability, scalability, and privacy, and how these were mitigated.