CrossChat: Instant Messaging across Different Apps on Mobile Devices
Authors: 
Menglong Cui, Mingsong Lv, Chuancai Gu, Tao Yang, Qiulin Chen, Nan GuanAuthors Info & Claims
Menglong Cui, Mingsong Lv, Chuancai Gu, Tao Yang, Qiulin Chen, Nan GuanAuthors Info & ClaimsPages 1068 - 1077
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.
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Index Terms
- CrossChat: Instant Messaging across Different Apps on Mobile Devices
Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.
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March 2023
1932 pages
ISBN:9781450395175
DOI:10.1145/3555776
- Conference Chairs:
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- Maart Lanperne,
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- Tomas Cerny,
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Published: 07 June 2023
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