Survey, comparison and evaluation of cross platform mobile application development tools

TLDR

Mobile application development is increasingly difficult due to the proliferation of platforms and their SDKs, prompting developers to adopt cross‑platform tools to lower costs and broaden user reach. This study offers decision criteria beyond portability for selecting an appropriate cross‑platform development tool. The authors identify key requirements, outline a general architecture, survey and compare WORA tools such as PhoneGap, Titanium, and Sencha Touch, and benchmark Android prototypes on CPU, memory, and power usage. PhoneGap outperforms the others by consuming less memory, CPU, and power, and the paper concludes with a summary of contributions and future research directions.

Abstract

Mobile application development is becoming more challenging with diverse platforms and their software development kits. In order to reduce the cost of development and reach out to maximum users across several platforms, developers are migrating to cross platform application development tools. In this paper, we provide several decision criteria beyond the portability concerns for choosing suitable cross platform tool for application development. The desirable requirements in a cross platform framework are identified. A general architecture for cross platform application development is discussed. Then a survey of several write once run anywhere tools (PhoneGap, Titanium, Sencha Touch) are provided along with a classification and comparison among the tools. To examine the performance in terms of CPU, memory usage, power consumption, Android test applications are developed using such tools. It is found that PhoneGap consumes less memory, CPU and power since it does not included dedicated UI components. Finally the paper summarizes the contributions and concludes with some future directions.