On the Impact of Development Frameworks on Mobile Apps
Parsa Karami, Ikram Darif, Cristiano Politowski, Ghizlane El Boussaidi, Sègla Kpodjedo, Imen Benzarti · 2023
Cross-platform mobile app development frame-works allow developers to use a single codebase to develop apps targeting different platforms. As these frame-works provide distinct features and may impact the apps' quality, their selection must be done with care. Although many works evaluated mobile frame-works, there is no synthesis on these studies. In this paper, we present a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) on approaches that evaluated cross- platform frame-works. Our SLR covers 75 papers and provides insights on 1) the most studied frame-works, 2) the criteria used for evaluation, 3) the evaluation methods used and 4) the results of these evaluations. The SLR shows that prior works generally used a prototype app to evaluate the frame-works but none explored the impact of the frame-works on the app's code quality. Thus, we carried out a preliminary empirical study on 3,566 mobile apps to evaluate the impact of mobile frame-works on the number of bugs and code smells in apps. The results of the study on native Android and React Native indicate that the latter has fewer code smells than native Android apps. Native Android apps generally had worse quality considering the number of bugs and code smells.