Background/Objectives: The main objectives are to present a comprehensive survey of mobile phones sensing applications by analyzing and classifying them in a unique chronological order, and identifying their features and shortcomings. Methods/Statistical Analysis: The literature focusing on using mobile phone sensors in applications is thoroughly tracked and selected for the study. The selected applications are analyzed and classified into different application domains using their features. A comparison framework is defined and comparisons are shown in tabular format. A generalized architecture for people-centric mobile sensing applications is proposed for increasing the potentials of researchers and developers, and saving them from being divided into separate islands. Findings: The integration of cheap yet powerful sensors have enabled the development of mobile phone sensing applications for solving problems in different domains which would be impossible otherwise. Analysis revealed that mobile phone sensing paradigm can be beneficent in dynamic capturing of information about different aspects of peoples' lives. However, the available solutions are mainly based on the distributed approach that uses a mobile phone as a gateway and rely heavily on external aids for capturing and storing information. This approach could be problematic in situations where supporting technologies are unavailable. State-of-the-art mobile phones are technologically advanced and are offering the same features and functionalities as personal computers. Mobile phone sensing applications should optimally exploit the potentials of mobile phones for effective solutions. Furthermore, the novel paradigm has a number of open issues and challenges that requires more contributions from the stack holders. The approaches and classification criterions used in the paper are unique and novel and providing more detailed and insight knowledge in an organized fashion as compared to the others. Applications/Improvements: This paper is aimed to provide a compact platform for researchers, especially the beginners, in understanding the phenomenon and diagnosing new research problems as well as finding solutions to the existing.
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