Introduction

Mobility is indispensable in the digital age, and mobile devices are portals through which users can connect with everything and everyone. Mobile devices are rapidly becoming the primary computing devices in people's lives. Mobile apps delivery platforms such as Google Play and the Apple App Store have transformed mobile phones into intelligent computing devices, by the means of applications that can be downloaded and installed instantly (Jayaraman et al., 2013). Smart - phones, tablets or e-readers can give access to data, information and knowledge on demand. Today, in a changing mobile world, publishers and proprietary database providers are eager to provide mobile apps and mobile websites to enable users to search from their mobile handsets, smartphones, tablets, e-readers, low-end devices and other similar devices. In view of this, a survey was done to see which mobile applications and platforms are provided by the most popular databases.

The major mobile platforms include iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Windows 8, BlackBerry and HTML5. With device-specific platforms and applications such as BlackBerry, iPhone, Palm, Android, Windows Mobile, Java and more, a survey was carried out to see how far the databases have been supported by the mobile applications.

Mobile apps

A mobile application is referred to as an ‘app’, i.e. a very small individual piece of software with limited functionality. It is application software designed to run on a mobile device, such as a smartphone, tablet or e-book reader. These applications serve to provide their users with similar services to those accessed on personal computers. They are available through app stores, which are native distribution platforms, provided by the owners of the mobile operating systems. Some of the most popular operating system native stores are Apple's App Store, Google Play, Windows Phone Store and BlackBerry App World. These mobile applications give an edge by providing the ability to access information on the go. The small screen size of a mobile device may make performing certain tasks more tedious or cumbersome, but mobile users do expect to perform more and more tasks on their mobile devices (Kim, 2013).

Advantages of mobile apps

Learning and research does not have any barriers and it goes beyond boundaries of space and time. So it is imperative for the citadels of knowledge and learning to adopt mobility as the key tool of delivery.