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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App Store Analysis studies information about applications obtained from app stores. App stores provide a wealth of information derived from users that would not exist had the applications been distributed via previous software deployment methods. App Store Analysis combines this non-technical information with technical information to learn trends and behaviours within these forms of software repositories. Findings from App Store Analysis have a direct and actionable impact on the software teams that develop software for app stores, and have led to techniques for requirements engineering, release planning, software design, security and testing. This survey describes and compares the areas of research that have been explored thus far, drawing out common aspects, trends and directions future research should take to address open problems and challenges.