With their increase, smartphones have become more integral components of our lives but do to their mobile nature it is not possible to develop a mobile application the same way another software system would be built. In order to always provide the full service, a mobile application needs to be able to detect and deal with changes of context it may be presented with. A suitable method to achieve this goal is self-adaptation. However, as of today it is difficult to have a clear view of existing research on self-adaptation in the context of mobile applications.
In this paper, we apply the systematic literature review methodology on selected peer-reviewed papers focusing on self-adaptability in the context of mobile applications. Out of 607 potentially relevant studies, we select 44 primary studies via carefully-defined exclusion and inclusion criteria. We then use known modelling dimensions for self-adaptive software systems as our classification framework, which we apply to all selected primary studies. Then, we synthesize the obtained data and produce a clear overview of the state of the art. The results of this study give a solid foundation to plan for future research and practice on self-adaptive mobile applications.