CrossChat: Instant Messaging across Different Apps on Mobile Devices

Menglong Cui, Mingsong Lv, Chuancai Gu, Tao Yang, Qiulin Chen, Nan Guan

Research output: Chapter in book / Conference proceedingConference article published in proceeding or bookAcademic researchpeer-review

Abstract

Mobile instant messaging (IM) apps allow people from everywhere to chat with each other using mobile devices, but chat between different mobile IM apps remains a problem. For example, a user who only uses WhatsApp cannot chat with another user who only uses LINE. In this work, we present CrossChat, a system that enables instant messaging across multiple mobile IM apps. Specifically, CrossChat establishes a gateway on a mobile device to connect users running different IM apps and leverages user interface (UI) techniques to capture and exchange messages across multiple mobile IM apps at run time. A main advantage of CrossChat is that no modification to the original apps' software implementation is required to realize cross-app chat. We present several use cases to show the benefits of CrossChat. Experiments were conducted on mainstream IM apps, which show that CrossChat brings slight run-time overhead and can provide a smooth user experience.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 38th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing, SAC 2023
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages1068-1077
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781450395175
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 27 Mar 2023
Event38th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, SAC 2023 - Tallinn, Estonia
Duration: 27 Mar 202331 Mar 2023

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing

Conference

Conference38th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, SAC 2023
Country/TerritoryEstonia
CityTallinn
Period27/03/2331/03/23

Keywords

  • cross-app
  • instant messaging
  • mobile device

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software

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