During the last years, the computational capabilities of smart mobile devices have been continuously improved by hardware vendors, raising new opportunities for mobile application engineers. Mobile augmented reality is one scenario demonstrating that smart mobile applications are becoming increasingly mature. In the AREA (Augmented Reality Engine Application) project, we developed a kernel that enables such location-based mobile augmented reality applications. On top of the kernel, mobile application developers can easily realize their individual applications. The kernel, in turn, focuses on robustness and high performance. In addition, it provides a flexible architecture that fosters the development of individual location-based mobile augmented reality applications. In the first stage of the project, the LocationView concept was developed as the core for realizing the kernel algorithms. This LocationView concept has proven its usefulness in the context of various applications, running on iOS, Android, or Windows Phone. Due to the further evolution of computational capabilities on one hand and emerging demands of location-based mobile applications on the other, we developed a new kernel concept. In particular, the new kernel allows for handling points of interests (POI) clusters or enables the use of tracks. These changes required new concepts presented in this paper. To demonstrate the applicability of our kernel, we apply it in the context of various mobile applications. As a result, mobile augmented reality applications could be run on present mobile operating systems and be effectively realized by engineers utilizing our approach. We regard such applications as a good example for using mobile computational capabilities efficiently in order to support mobile users in everyday life more properly. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.