Location based sports/fitness app : Android app for smartphones

Abstract: The City of Stockholm’s budget for sports is 1.6% of the total city budget in 2014. About 60,000, licensed (age 15 and up, about 50%) and younger actively played soccer in Stockholm in 2005. That is roughly 24% of the total number of participants in sports activities in Stockholm’s district. There is a need for a location-based application (commonly abbreviated "app") to help people spontaneously meet for different sports activities. The app developed and analyzed in this thesis will address this need and assist potential participants in organizing sports activities, deciding to participate in these activities, make friends, etc. Not only large team sports will be considered, but sports done in pairs such as tennis and other sports as well that you do with others. Consider a person who has moved to a new city and wants to play football (soccer), but does not know people in this city. This app can help this person find others who would like to play in a quick and easy way by looking at a map and seeing where others would like to participate in this sport, for example at a particular soccer field, using location information concerning the potential participants and this specific field. Apps that use location information have become very common with the widespread use of smartphones. Such an app provides a location-based service. This thesis describes the design and implementation of an Android app with a location-based service and how to set up this app, what technology is needed to get the needed location information, and the programming language used. In addition, the thesis considers users’ needs and how the app caters to those needs. An analysis will be done of how well this app communicates with a database server as the number of users increases, scales. Performance and load on both the server and app will be considered. The performance will be analyzed to see how well it matches the users’ expectations. The app developed in this thesis will be for the Android platform and Apple's iOS (but the focus in the thesis is on the Android-version). This app will communicate with a database server running a Linux OS, an Apache HTTP server, a MySQL database, and using a PHP programming web infrastructure (such a setup of services is commonly called by the acronym LAMP). The app will connect to Facebook and Twitter to exchange information (however, that is outside the scope of this thesis).