During last ten years, the number of smartphones and mobile applications has been constantly growing. Android, iOS and Windows Mobile are three mobile platforms that cover almost all smartphones in the world in 2017. Developing a mobile app involves first to choose the platforms the app will run, and then to develop specific solutions (i.e., native apps) for each chosen platform using platform-related toolkits such as AndroidSDK. Across-platform mobile application is an app that runs on two or more mobile platforms. Several frameworks have been proposed to simplify the development of cross-platform mobile applications and to reduce development and maintenance costs.They are called cross-platform mobile app development frameworks.However, to our knowledge, the life-cycle and the quality of cross-platforms mobile applications built using those frameworks have not been studied in depth. Our main goal is to first study the processes of development and maintenance of mobile applications built using cross-platform mobile app development frameworks, focusing particularly on the bug-fixing activity. Then, we aim at defining tools for automated repairing bugs from cross-platform mobile applications.
Empirical studies of Cross-platforms mobile apps: @cite_12 analyzed the energy consumption of mobile development. Their results showed the adoption of cross-platform frameworks as development tools always implies an increase in energy consumption, even if the final application is a real native application.
@cite_12
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Optimizing the energy efficiency of mobile applications can greatly increase user satisfaction. However, developers lack viable techniques for estimating the energy consumption of their applications. This paper proposes a new approach that is both lightweight in terms of its developer requirements and provides fine-grained estimates of energy consumption at the code level. It achieves this using a novel combination of program analysis and per-instruction energy modeling. In evaluation, our approach is able to estimate energy consumption to within 10 of the ground truth for a set of mobile applications from the Google Play store. Additionally, it provides useful and meaningful feedback to developers that helps them to understand application energy consumption behavior. During last ten years, the number of smartphones and mobile applications has been constantly growing. Android, iOS and Windows Mobile are three mobile platforms that cover almost all smartphones in the world in 2017. Developing a mobile app involves first to choose the platforms the app will run, and then to develop specific solutions (i.e., native apps) for each chosen platform using platform-related toolkits such as Android SDK. A cross-platform mobile application is an app that runs on two or more mobile platforms. Several frameworks have been proposed to simplify the development of cross-platform mobile applications and to reduce development and maintenance costs. They are called cross-platform mobile app development frameworks. However, to our knowledge, the life-cycle and the quality of cross-platforms mobile applications built using those frameworks have not been studied in depth. Our main goal is to first study the processes of development and maintenance of mobile applications built using cross-platform mobile app development frameworks, focusing particularly on the bug-fixing activity. Then, we aim at defining tools for automated repairing bugs from cross-platform mobile applications. The fragmented smartphone market with at least five important mobile platforms makes native development of mobile applications (apps) a challenging and costly endeavour. Cross-platform development might alleviate this situation. Several cross-platform approaches have emerged, which we classify in a first step. In order to compare concrete cross-platform solutions, we compiled a set of criteria to assess cross-platform development approaches. Based on these criteria, we evaluated Web apps, apps developed with PhoneGap or Titanium Mobile, and – for comparison – natively developed apps. We present our findings as reference tables and generalize our results. Our criteria have proven to be viable for follow-up evaluations. With regard to the approaches, we found PhoneGap viable if very close resemblance to a native look & feel can be neglected. Mobiles are an integral part of daily life. With time, customers are expecting good and very versatile applications in less time. It is a big challenge to develop high performance mobile applications in this competitive market that would meet the expectation of customers. Mobile operating systems vendors are giving their best available resources for making applications in more convenient ways, although the development of new applications for each mobile operating system in short time is fairly a problem. Cross-platform mobile application development tools contribute in solving this problem largely. This paper presents a pragmatic comparison among four very popular cross platform tools, which are Rhodes, PhoneGap, DragonRad and MoSync. One of the main focuses of the comparison is to provide an overview on the availability of application programming interfaces, programming languages, supported mobile operating systems, licences, and integrated development environments. Furthermore, it also presents some critical points such as the factor of extensibility in tools and the effects that they may bring on market share. The comparison is aimed at supporting developers to make the right choice with respect to their needs constraints.