The approach also circumvents the built-in mobile permission
schemes on both the source and the target to enable
emulated execution and sensor access. The assumption is that
the source is secured on a server. However, in future work, we
plan to explore with supporting more fine-grained permission
schemes during the translation process. Thus far, we have not
taken a close look at security. Once the approach matures, an
increased focus will be placed on security.
Yet another limitation to Cloud Twin’s applicability is lacking
support for platform-specific hardware, such as Near Field
Chip (NFC) on Android. Cloud Twin cannot support the UI
interactions that involve platform-specific hardware, without
equivalents on all major platforms. However, the extensible
architecture of Cloud Twin makes it possible to support newly
introduced hardware components.
Lastly, the overhead of maintaining cloud-based emulators
can become an obstacle to widespread use of the technology.
Cloud Twin requires the availability of numerous dedicated
edge servers, as running multiple emulators may take inordinate
amounts of memory and processor resources. Depending
on the underlying cloud infrastructure cost model, Cloud Twin
may not scale well for high-volume commercial deployments.