Adaptive Mobile Learning Systems (AMLS) are software tools designed based on an adaptive learning paradigm to generate a personalized teaching–learning process for each student. This fact has motivated various works to propose AMLS; however, many fail to address all essential requirements for effective adaptive learning, resulting in suboptimal design decisions. This work presents a reference software architecture for developing AMLS. Our architecture provides a layered architectural style with the necessary components for information extraction, storage, processing, reasoning, providing adaptation services, and security. The proposed software architecture was evaluated based on three main aspects: correctness and coverage of desirable requirements, validation and verification of the elements of a reference architecture, and usability evaluation. The results show that our software architecture is characterized by providing suitable architectural support for developing AMLS, which meets the needed requirements.