An Empirical Investigation of Performance Overhead in Cross-Platform Mobile Development Frameworks

AbstractThe heterogeneity of the leading mobile platforms in terms of user interfaces, user experience, programming language, and ecosystem have made cross-platform development frameworks popular. These aid the creation of mobile applications – apps – that can be executed across the target platforms (typically Android and iOS) with minimal to no platform-specific code. Due to the cost- and time-saving possibilities introduced through adopting such a framework, researchers and practitioners alike have taken an interest in the underlying technologies. Examining the body of knowledge, we, nonetheless, frequently encounter discussions on the drawbacks of these frameworks, especially with regard…

The Use of Cross-Platform Frameworks for Google Play Store Apps

In this paper, we describe the harnessing and analyses of a large sample (n = 661705) of Android apps and associated metadata available on the Google Play Store. The analyses and scrutiny are in the context of cross-platform mobile development, as we report on the technologies used to develop apps for the Android ecosystem. Specifically, we quantify the use of 13 technical frameworks for cross-platform development, identify their distribution across Google Play Store categories, present an overview of framework usage from 2008 to 2019, app file size (.apk size), and lastly discuss our findings in the context of current industry trends and directions. Our findings indicate that cross-platfor…

Software Development for Mobile Computing, the Internet of Things and Wearable Devices: Inspecting the Past to Understand the Future

Progressive Web Apps: the Definite Approach to Cross-Platform Development?

Progressive Web Apps: The Possible Web-native Unifier for Mobile Development

Progressive Web Apps for the Unified Development of Mobile Applications

Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) allow for web applications to be developed in an offline-first approach. While Web apps traditionally did not properly function without an Internet connection, PWAs enable them to be downloaded, installed and used offline on various systems, including mobile devices and personal computers. We present an introduction to the state-of-art in research and practice. Based on this, we discuss various underlying concepts and technologies. Then, we scrutinize and compare PWAs against cross-platform app development approaches on both technical and overarching aspects. A list of suggestions for future research is also presented. We urge academia to keep up with the latest …