Greg Lewis

A Survey of Cross-Platform Mobile Programming Environments

Smart mobile devices are handling more and more of our everyday computing. The mobile application market has been experiencing tremendous growth as a result. Companies are being forced to implement mobile-friendly solutions for their products in the form of mobile applications and developers and investors alike are looking to mobile applications as a promising field to get involved in. An emerging approach to the development of mobile applications is the concept of cross-platform development, developing a single application for multiple mobile platforms. This is an interesting field of research which is not, as of yet, well represented in the world of academia.

The purpose of this project was to perform an evaluation of cross-platform mobile programming environments as a way to begin exploring this emerging field, provide insight into the capabilities of these environments, and examine their effectiveness as a development tool. A criteria framework was developed in order to evaluate these environments and provide a wide foundational overview of the individual strengths and weaknesses of each environment. The environments were evaluated in terms of their implementations of the Android and iOS platforms specifically.

The evaluation found that there are many different ways of approaching cross-platform development and many different implementations of similar features. The development environments examined were found to be sophisticated collections of tools and features suitable for the creation of large-scale, complex mobile applications making use of native APIs and controls, as well as small and simple applications made exclusively using shared code. The benefits of the cross-platform approach to development in terms of resources required and speed of development make it more than viable as an option to consider when developing mobile applications.