Mobile phones are no longer simply a means of communication, but have gradually become supporting devices for day-to-day tasks. It is predicted that by 2020 all software will be developed for mobile devices, and this implies it is necessary to explore the issues involved in the design, development, and deployment of mobile applications.

We accepted two papers for publication in this special section in response to an open call for papers exploring the challenges and opportunities presented by incorporating human aspects in mobile app engineering.

Mark Syer, Meiyappan Nagappan, Bram Adams, and Ahmed Hassan explore the relationships between platform dependencies and the defect proneness of Android apps in the paper “Studying the relationship between source code quality and mobile platform dependence”. The results of this work show that source code files that are defect prone have a higher dependence on the platform they are developed on. Moreover, an increase in the platform dependence leads to an increase in the likelihood of a defect being present in the source code.

Bernhard Peischl, Michaela Ferk, and Andreas Holzinger report on a user-centred development approach to medical apps development in their paper “The fine art of user-centred software development”. The authors identify several non-functional requirements to be used in analysing and comparing mobile platforms to support the development of medical apps. The paper illustrates a method to integrate user-centred design in the early stages of medical mobile app development under the constraints of limited resources.

We would like to thank the reviewers for their careful consideration of the submitted papers. We would also like to thank all the authors for sharing their work on this important topic.