End-user programmers on the loose: A study of programming on the phone for the phone

Abstract

Microsoft TouchDevelop is a programming environment enabling users use their phones to create scripts that run on the mobile phones. This is achieved via a semi-structured editor and a programming language with several distinctive features, such as support for using smartphone hardware. In order to uncover opportunities for future tool development aimed at facilitating end-user programming of phones on phones, we have investigated the kinds of scripts that people are creating with the current tool set as well as what problems they ask for help with solving. This paper is the first to study how end-user programmers “in the wild” are programming mobile phones. In particular, no previous study has investigated the ways in which end users programmatically use mobile phones' special hardware (e.g., GPS, accelerometer, gyroscope) for practical everyday purposes. We discovered that, in essence, people are using TouchDevelop to create apps: downloadable applications with small, fairly reliable feature sets that take advantage of mobile hardware. In addition, we identified several areas for further innovation aimed at enhancing the programming tool and the online repository where users share scripts with one another.