A Survey on Mobile Applications for Smart Agriculture: Making Use of Mobile Software in Modern Farming

The increasing global demand for food and nutrition security has raised the need to automate processes in modern farming. As such, a promising way to automate those processes is by using smart agriculture applications (SAAs). Different studies in the literature classify these applications based on agricultural themes, agricultural domains, and farming scenarios. However, this classification is not sufficient for researchers and industry to gain deeper insights on software engineering issues pertaining to SAAs. In this survey, we explore SAAs and further classify them based on architectural models, supported software engineering issues, and target mobile platforms. The survey results show that SAAs in general (1) follow different architectural models, (2) are targeted for different mobile platforms, and (3) satisfy different software engineering issues. Most importantly, the key findings from this study reveal that SAAs can fail to meet their intended purpose if developers ignore key software engineering issues. These findings can be used as a starting point for researchers and industry to implement smart agriculture related mobile applications. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.