The impact of cross-platform development approaches for mobile applications from the user's perspective

Mercado, Ivan; Munaiah, Nuthan; Meneely, Andrew

doi:10.1145/2993259.2993268

Cited by 26 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Native look & feel and short reaction times are direct consequences. Apps appear and can be interacted with in the same way as platform-specific apps respectively of the mobile operating system itself; the performance is high at least for carefully designed apps [28]. Obviously, native development was the starting point for app development when platforms were newly released.…”

Section: Baseline: Native Development and Webappsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Majchrzak¹,

Biørn-Hansen²,

Grønli³

2018

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

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Although development practices for apps have matured, cross-platform development remains a prominent topic. Typically, apps should always support both Android and iOS devices. They ought to run smoothly on various hardware, and be compatible with a host of platform versions. Additionally, device categories beyond smartphone and tablets have emerged, which makes multi-platform support even trickier. Truly developing an app once and serving the multitude of possible targets remains an issue despite having crossplatform frameworks that are acknowledged by practice and research. The technology unifier remains to be found, but Progressive Web Apps (PWA) might be a step towards it. In this paper, we analyse the foundations of PWAs in cross-platform development and scrutinize the status quo of current possibilities. Based on our observations, we investigate unified development, and discuss open questions. We seek to stimulate interest and narrow the immense gap that has arisen since industry started to embrace PWAs.

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Section: Baseline: Native Development and Webappsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Majchrzak¹,

Biørn-Hansen²,

Grønli³

2018

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

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“…They differ from Hybrid apps in that the rendered user interface is actual native interface components [9], [21]. As such, the user interface is as native as a regular native app written in a platform-specific language would be.…”

Section: Interpretedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bridging the Gap: Investigating Device-Feature Exposure in Cross-Platform Development

Biørn-Hansen

Ghinea

2018

Proceedings of the 51st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

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By traversing academia and developer communities, two predominant approaches to cross-platform mobile development have been identified, specifically Hybrid and Interpreted. Previous research has established the use and integration of platform-and device-specific features to be core requirements for cross-platform frameworks. In this study we assess and discuss how the Hybrid and Interpreted approaches facilitate the use of native device features from within a JavaScript context, and how custom communication bridges are both developed and integrated. Our research motivation lies in data from an industry survey, stating that developers perceive device communication as a real painpoint. While both approaches exist to ease development of mobile apps, they are fundamentally different at a technical level. The article takes a technical approach, drawing evaluations and discussions from two app implementations. Our findings indicate that implementation and development of communication bridges are non-complex tasks, and that execution-time performance varies greatly.

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“…Recent research identified includes, but is not limited to, topics such as requirements for cross-platform tooling (Gaouar et al, 2016), development approach evaluation frameworks (Rieger and Majchrzak, 2016), energy consumption comparisons (Ciman and Gaggi, 2016), and end-user perception of cross-platform apps (Mercado et al, 2016;Malavolta et al, 2015a). Their contributions should be acknowledged as important foundation for future research on progressive web apps.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It typically not only reduces the development effort but also enables a quicker time-to-market (Rahul and Tolety, 2012). While its application and reputation varies in academia and industry communities (Puvvala et al, 2016;Mercado et al, 2016), the idea of a single code base -which can be deployed to multiple platformsis seen as appealing for a variety of reasons. These include, but are not limited to, budget, human resources, and existing knowledge (Corral et al, 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Biørn-Hansen

Majchrzak

Grønli

2017

Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies

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A recent advancement of the mobile web has enabled features previously only found in natively developed apps. Thus, arduous development for several platforms or using cross-platform approaches was required. The novel approach, coined Progressive Web Apps, can be implemented through a set of concepts and technologies on any web site that meets certain requirements. In this paper, we argue for progressive web apps as a possibly unifying technology for web apps and native apps. After an introduction of features, we scrutinize the performance. Two cross-platform mobile apps and one Progressive Web App have been developed for comparison purposes, and provided in an open source repository for results' validity verification. We aim to spark interest in the academic community, as a lack of academic involvement was identified as part of the literature search.

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The impact of cross-platform development approaches for mobile applications from the user's perspective

Cited by 26 publications

References 18 publications

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

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

Bridging the Gap: Investigating Device-Feature Exposure in Cross-Platform Development

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

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