The spread of smartphones, or mobile terminals exhibiting high performance comparable with personal computers has been advancing. In addition, due to 3G/Long Term Evolution (LTE)/plenty of hotspots, etc., an environment in which the smartphone may be connected to a network at all times is becoming more common.
By taking advantage of such an environment, an information processing system, which transmits an application and data to a mobile terminal from an application server, is provided. In the system, the application server distributes an application at a desired timing, the application is executed in the mobile terminal, and the application and data are deleted by the application server after the execution is over. In the information processing system, the application server performs the distribution of an application to the mobile terminal and the deletion of an application, etc. from the mobile terminal. Once an application has been transmitted from the application server to the mobile terminal, the application is executable in the mobile terminal even when the connection between the mobile terminal and the application server is disconnected. When the execution of the application in the mobile terminal is over, the application server deletes the application in the mobile terminal without causing a user to delete the application. Thus, information leakage from the mobile terminal is reduced.
However, when the network connection is disconnected after an application is transmitted from the application server to the mobile terminal, the application server is not allowed to delete the application stored in the mobile terminal, so that the risk of the information leakage is increased when the user has lost the mobile terminal.
In order to give priority to the maintenance of security, the mobile terminal may be configured to immediately delete an application of the mobile terminal in case the network connection is disconnected after the application is transmitted from the application server to the mobile terminal. However, for example, when the network connection is temporarily disconnected, the user undesirably downloads the application from the application server to the mobile terminal again after the network connection is reestablished, so that the user may think it troublesome to download the application.
Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication Nos. 2006-3996 and 2011-23024 are examples of the related art.