Mining and characterizing hybrid apps
Mohamed Ali, Ali Mesbah · 2016
Mobile apps have grown tremendously over the past few years. To capitalize on this growth and to attract more users, implementing the same mobile app for different platforms has become a common industry practice. Building the same app natively for each platform is resource intensive and time consuming since every platform has different environments, languages and APIs. Cross Platform Tools (CPTs) address this challenge by allowing developers to use a common code- base to simultaneously create apps for multiple platforms. Apps created using these CPTs are called hybrid apps. We mine 15,512 hybrid apps and present the first study of its kind on such apps. We identify which CPTs these apps use and how users perceive them. Further, we compare the user-perceived ratings of hybrid apps to native apps of the same category. Finally, we compare the user-perceived ratings of the same hybrid app on the Android and iOS platforms.