Native versus Cross-platform frameworks for mobile application development
Patrizia Scandurra, Rosario Madauto · 2013
Mobile application development is vibrant and reach of opportunities. However, new development questions arise, including what devices to target and which development frameworks to use for creating simple and reliable applications. Based on our recent experience on developing for mobile devices, in this paper we compare the two main approaches for developing mobile applications (or simply apps), namely i) by using native APIs of the target platform and ii) by adopting cross-platform environments (mostly WEB-based). In particular, we examine the role of Eclipse in both approaches and present our position on combining preciseness and efficiency of native APIs with the flexibility and automation of the Web-based frameworks to achieve significant boosts in both productivity and quality in mobile application development.