Research TrackMOBILESoft 2026

Call for Papers

The technical papers track of MOBILESoft invites high-quality submissions involving significant, novel, and emerging solutions for mobile (e.g., Android, iOS, OpenHarmony, etc.) application software engineering. These include (but are not limited to) technological advancements, architectural approaches, software security, advancements in design and implementation methods, testing and analysis approaches, user interfaces and HCI, business and organizational issues, and empirical studies. We solicit: Full research papers (up to 10 pages +2 pages for references only): Significant new research contributions. Research that directly impacts mobile software engineering practice. For other types of papers, please refer to the different tracks. Papers should include methodology, implementation, results, and discussion as appropriate. Solutions are expected to be rigorously evaluated. The paper must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review elsewhere whilst under consideration at MOBILESoft. We invite contributions from both academia and industry.

Important Dates (AoE)

• NEW DEADLINE: Thursday, November 6, 2025
• Submission Deadline (old): Thursday, October 23, 2025
• Notification of Acceptance: Monday, January 5, 2026
• Camera-Ready Deadline: Monday, January 26, 2026

Formatting and Submission Instructions

Submissions to MOBILESoft 2026 must conform to the **official “ACM Primary Article Template”**, using the sigconfoption, as well as the review option.

LaTEX users must use the provided acmart.cls and ACM-Reference-Format.bst without modification, enable the conference format in the preamble of the document (i.e., \documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart}), and use the ACM reference format for the bibliography (i.e., \bibliographystyle{ACM-Reference-Format}).

All submissions must be in PDF format and must strictly adhere to the ACM conference proceedings formatting instructions. Submissions that do not comply with these formatting requirements (e.g., by altering spacing, font sizes, or margins) may be desk-rejected without further review.

The page limit is 10 pages for the main text, inclusive of all figures, tables, and appendices. Up to 2 additional pages are allowed for references only. All submissions must be original and not under review or published elsewhere. By submitting to MOBILESoft 2026, authors agree to comply with the ACM and IEEE plagiarism and authorship policies.

MOBILESoft 2026 will follow a double-anonymous review process. Therefore:

• Author names must be omitted from all submissions.
• References to prior work by the authors must be written in the third person to avoid revealing identity.
• If submitting a preprint (e.g., to arXiv), authors must avoid mentioning submission to MOBILESoft 2026, and are encouraged to use a different title than the one submitted to the conference.

Open Science Policy

Just like leading software engineering conferences, such as ICSE, the steering principle of the Open Science policy of MOBILESoft 2026 is that all research results should be accessible to the public and, if possible, empirical studies should be reproducible. In particular, we actively support the adoption of open data and open source principles and encourage all contributing authors to disclose (anonymized and curated) data to increase reproducibility and replicability. Note that sharing research data is not mandatory for submission or acceptance. However, sharing is expected to be the default, and non-sharing needs to be justified. We recognize that reproducibility or replicability is not a goal in qualitative research and that, similar to industrial studies, qualitative studies often face challenges in sharing research data. For guidelines on how to report qualitative research to ensure the assessment of the reliability and credibility of research results, see the Q&A page from ICSE.

Upon submission to the research track, authors are asked:

• to make their data available to the program committee (via upload of supplemental material or a link to an anonymous repository) – and provide instructions on how to access this data in the paper, possibly in a section named “Data Availability” after the Conclusions; or
• to include in the paper an explanation as to why this is not possible or desirable; and
• to indicate if they intend to make their data publicly available upon acceptance. At least one reviewer will check whether the enclosed package contains what is declared in the paper. This quality check process will be very lightweight, and the main aim is to ensure that authors do not submit (partially) empty packages.

Submission

Submissions to the Technical Track can be made via hotCRP: https://mobilesoft2026.hotcrp.com/

Review Criteria

Each paper submitted to the Technical Papers Track will be evaluated based on the following criteria (we rely in part on ICSE Review Criteria 2026):

• Novelty: The novelty and innovativeness of contributed solutions, problem formulations, methodologies, theories, and/or evaluations—i.e., the extent to which the paper is sufficiently original with respect to the state of the art.

• Rigor: The soundness, clarity, and depth of a technical or theoretical contribution, and the level of thoroughness and completeness of an evaluation.

• Relevance: The significance and/or potential impact of the research on the field of software engineering.

• Verifiability and Transparency: The extent to which the paper includes sufficient information to understand how an innovation works; to understand how data was obtained, analyzed, and interpreted; and how the paper supports independent verification or replication of the paper’s claimed contributions. Any artifacts attached to or linked from the paper will be checked by one reviewer.

• Presentation: The clarity of the exposition in the paper.

Reviewers will carefully consider all of the above criteria during the review process, and authors should take great care in clearly addressing them all. The paper should clearly explain and justify the claimed contributions. Each paper will be handled by an area chair who will ensure reviewing consistency among papers submitted within that area.

Conference Attendance Expectation

At least one author of each accepted paper must register and attend MOBILESoft 2026 to present the paper.