Domain-Specific Modeling and Code Generation for Cross-Platform Multi-Device Mobile Apps

Nowadays, mobile devices constitute the most common computing device. This new computing model has brought intense competition among hardware and software providers who are continuously introducing increasingly powerful mobile devices and innovative OSs into the market. In consequence, cross-platform and multi-device development has become a priority for software companies that want to reach the widest possible audience. However, developing an application for several platforms implies high costs and technical complexity. Currently, there are several frameworks that allow cross-platform application development. However, these approaches still require manual programming. My research proposes to face the challenge of the mobile revolution by exploiting abstraction, modeling and code generation, in the spirit of the modern paradigm of Model Driven Engineering

The Use of Cross-Platform Frameworks for Google Play Store Apps

In this paper, we describe the harnessing and analyses of a large sample (n = 661705) of Android apps and associated metadata available on the Google Play Store. The analyses and scrutiny are in the context of cross-platform mobile development, as we report on the technologies used to develop apps for the Android ecosystem. Specifically, we quantify the use of 13 technical frameworks for cross-platform development, identify their distribution across Google Play Store categories, present an overview of framework usage from 2008 to 2019, app file size (.apk size), and lastly discuss our findings in the context of current industry trends and directions. Our findings indicate that cross-platform apps account for approximately 15% (n = 99304) of the dataset, and that all overarching development approaches are present

Achieving Business Practicability of Model-Driven Cross-Platform Apps

Due to the incompatibility of mobile device platforms such as Android and iOS, apps have to be developed separately for each target platform. Cross-platform development approaches based on Web technology have significantly improved over the last years. However, since they do not lead to native apps, these frameworks are not feasible for all kinds of business apps. Moreover, the way apps are developed is cumbersome. Advanced cross-platform approaches such as MD2, which is based on model-driven development (MDSD) techniques, are a much more powerful yet less mature choice. We discuss business implications of MDSD for apps and introduce MD2 as our proposed solution to fulfill typical requirements. Moreover, we highlight a business-oriented enhancement that further increases MD2's business practicability. We generalize our findings and sketch the path towards more versatile MDSD of apps

Extending the Interaction Flow Modeling Language (IFML) for Model Driven Development of Mobile Applications Front End

International audienceFront-end design of mobile applications is a complex and multidisciplinary task, where many perspectives intersect and the user experience must be perfectly tailored to the application objectives. However, development of mobile user interactions is still largely a manual task, which yields to high risks of errors, inconsistencies and ine ciencies. In this paper we propose a model-driven approach to mobile application development based on the IFML standard. We propose an extension of the Interaction Flow Modeling Language tailored to mobile applications and we describe our implementation experience that comprises the development of automatic code generators for cross-platform mobile applications based on HTML5, CSS and JavaScript optimized for the Apache Cordova framework. We show the approach at work on a popular mobile application, we report on the application of the approach on an industrial application development project and we provide a productivity comparison with traditional approaches

Comprehensive Analysis of Innovative Cross-Platform App Development Frameworks

Mobile apps are increasingly realized by using a cross-platform development framework. Using such frameworks, code is written once but the app can be deployed to multiple platforms. Despite progress in research on cross-platform techniques, results (i.e. apps) are not always satisfactory. They are subject to tedious tailoring and the development effort tends to be notable. In these cases, either pure web apps (realized through web browsers) or native apps (realized for each platform separately) are chosen. Recent activities have led to new approaches. In this paper, we have a closer look at three of these, namely React Native, the Ionic Framework, and Fuse. We present a comprehensive analysis of the three approaches. Our work is based on a real-world use case, which allows us to provide generalizable advice. Our findings suggest that there is no clear winner; the frameworks incorporate notable ideas and general progress in the field can be asserted

Mobile application platform selection

Abstract. Native and web apps have their own advantages and disadvantages in the field of mobile app industry. This fact has forced industry to make reforms and develop new tools and technologies to mitigate the disadvantages by both platform types. Different cross-platform development approaches have lowered the costs of developing apps to multiple different platforms and progressive web apps (PWA) have improved efficiency and user experience for web apps. This thesis strives to clarify the selection, which platform or approach the company should choose for their upcoming app. This is done by finding the properties and requirements found important by shareholders and finding out how capable platform/approach is meeting with the properties

A Model-Driven Cross-Platform App Development Process for Heterogeneous Device Classes

App development has gained importance since the advent of smartphones to enable the ubiquitous access to information. Until now, multi- or cross-platform approaches are usually limited to different platforms for smartphones and tablets. With the recent trend towards app-enabled mobile devices, a plethora of heterogeneous devices such as smartwatches and smart TVs continues to emerge. For app developers, the situation resembles the early days of smartphones but worsened by the widely differing hardware, platform capabilities, and usage patterns. In order to tackle the identified challenges of app development beyond the boundaries of individual device classes, a systematic process built on the model-driven paradigm is presented. In addition, we demonstrate its applicability using the MAML framework to create interoperable business apps for both smartphones and smartwatches from a common, platform-independent model

Enhancing Mobile Data Collection Applications with Sensing Capabilities

Over the past years, using smart mobile devices for data collection purposes has become ubiquitous in many application domains, replacing traditional pen-and-paper based data collection approaches. However, in many cases, modern approaches only aim to replicate traditional data collection instruments (e.g., paper-based questionnaires) in a digital from (e.g., smartphone surveys). Thereby, the full potential of smart mobile devices is often not fully exploited. Most modern smart mobile devices comprise a variety of sensing capabilities, which may provide valuable data, and thus insights. In addition, external sensors and devices may be easily connected to become part of the overall data collection process. In order to integrate sensing functionality into existing data collection applications, one has to address each desired sensor manually from within the application, which may cause severe development effort. Alternatively one can fall back on dedicated sensing frameworks to perform sensing operations. However, the latter are often targeted towards one specific mobile platform (e.g., iOS or Android) or lack required functionality, which may also lead to unnecessary development overhead when implementing mobile data collection applications. To cope with these issues, a cross-platform mobile sensing framework that can be used within large-scale mobile data collection scenarios was developed in the context of this thesis. Thereby, an in-depth look at existing mobile sensing frameworks as well as common use case scenarios is taken. Further, requirements derived from the latter are explicitly stated and were taken into consideration in the course of the overall development process. The latter is documented and discussed in detail in the course of this thesis, including the design of a framework architecture, implementation details and the integration of the framework into mobile data collection applications

Achieving Business Practicability of Model-Driven Cross-Platform Apps

-Due to the incompatibility of mobile device platforms such as Android and iOS, apps have to be developed separately for each target platform. Cross-platform development approaches based on Web technology have significantly improved over the last years. However, since they do not lead to native apps, these frameworks are not feasible for all kinds of business apps. Moreover, the way apps are developed is cumbersome. Advanced cross-platform approaches such as MD2, which is based on model-driven development (MDSD) techniques, are a much more powerful yet less mature choice. We discuss business implications of MDSD for apps and introduce MD2 as our proposed solution to fulfill typical requirements. Moreover, we highlight a business-oriented enhancement that further increases MD2's business practicability. We generalize our findings and sketch the path towards more versatile MDSD of app

Evaluating usability of cross-platform smartphone applications

The computing power of smartphones is increasing as time goes. However, the proliferation of multiple different types of operating platforms affected interoperable smartphone applications development. Thus, the cross-platform development tools are coined. Literature showed that smartphone applications developed with the native platforms have better user experience than the cross-platform counterparts. However, comparative evaluation of usability of cross-platform applications on the deployment platforms is not studied yet. In this work, we evaluated usability of a crossword puzzle developed with PhoneGap on Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry. The evaluation was conducted focusing on the developer's adaptation effort to native platforms and the end users. Thus, we observed that usability of the cross-platform crossword puzzle is unaffected on the respective native platforms and the SDKs require only minimal configuration effort. In addition, we observed the prospect of HTML5 and related web technologies as our future work towards evaluating and enhancing usability in composing REST-based services for smartphone applications