Cross Platform Development tools for mobile applications, a performance and cost evaluation
Mårten Pålsson · KTH Publication Database DiVA (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) · 2014
Since the introduction of smart-phones, cellular phones have changed from relatively simple communication devices to becoming more akin to small computers in their own right.The smart-phone market is riddled with different platforms,with the most popular being Google’s Android, and Apple’siOS. Each of these platforms use their own operating systems and technologies, making the smart-phone eco-systemhighly fragmented. This leads to problems for companies wishing to target more than one platform, since applications developed for one device will not work on another.To solve this problem several different cross-platform development tools have appeared. These tools aim to provide developers with a solution along the lines of develop once and deploy anywhere. Cross-platform development tools come in many different forms and utilize different technologies to allow applications to work on different platforms.This project has evaluated two of these approaches in order to to provide a suggestion on which is the most suitable for a company wishing to develop applications for multiple platforms. The evaluation has been based on a performanceand cost analysis between a web-to-native wrapperand a source code translator.The result of this work is two-fold. Firstly the potential financial gains are based on the skill set of the company in question, and no clear differentiation can be seen between the two approaches. Secondly, while source codetranslators provide better performance compared to web-to-native wrappers, web-to-native wrappers are more flexibleand thus generally a better alternative when developing applications for multiple platforms.