The heterogeneity of the leading mobile platforms in terms of user interfaces, user experience, programming language, and ecosystem have made cross-platform development frameworks popular. These aid the creation of mobile applications – apps – that can be executed across the target platforms (typically Android and iOS) with minimal to no platform-specific code. Due to the cost- and time-saving possibilities introduced through adopting such a framework, researchers and practitioners alike have taken an interest in the underlying technologies. Examining the body of knowledge, we, nonetheless, frequently encounter discussions on the drawbacks of these frameworks, especially with regard to the performance of the apps they generate. Motivated by the ongoing discourse and a lack of empirical evidence, we scrutinised the essential piece of the cross-platform frameworks: the bridge enabling cross-platform code to communicate with the underlying operating system and device hardware APIs. The study we present in the article benchmarks and measures the performance of this bridge to reveal its associated overhead in Android apps. The development of the artifacts for this experiment was conducted using five cross-platform development frameworks to generate Android apps, in addition to a baseline native Android app implementation. Our results indicate that – for Android apps – the use of cross-platform frameworks for the development of mobile apps may lead to decreased performance compared to the native development approach. Nevertheless, certain cross-platform frameworks can perform equally well or even better than native on certain metrics which highlights the importance of well-defined technical requirements and specifications for deliberate selection of a cross-platform framework or overall development approach.

Developing applications targeting mobile devices is a complex task involving numerous options, technologies, and trade-offs, mostly due to the proliferation and fragmentation of devices and platforms. As a result of this, cross-platform app development has enjoyed the attention of practitioners and academia for the previous decade. Throughout this review, we assess the academic body of knowledge and report on the state of research on the field. We do so with a particular emphasis on core concepts, including those of user experience, device features, performance, and security. Our findings illustrate that the state of research demand for empirical verification of an array of unbacked claims, and that a particular focus on qualitative user-oriented research is essential. Through our outlined taxonomy and state of research overview, we identify research gaps and challenges, and provide numerous suggestions for further research.

The purpose of this study is to report on the industry’s perspectives and opinions on cross-platform mobile development, with an emphasis on the popularity, adoption, and arising issues related to the use of technical development frameworks and tools. We designed and conducted an online survey questionnaire, for which 101 participants were recruited from various developer-oriented online forums and websites. A total of five questions are reported in this study, of which two employed a Likert scale instrument, while three were based on multiple choice. In terms of technical frameworks, we find that PhoneGap, the Ionic Framework, and React Native were the most popular in use, both in hobby projects and in professional settings. The participants report an awareness of trade-offs when embracing cross-platform technologies and consider penalties in performance and user experience to be expected. This is also in line with what is reported in academic research. We find patterns in the reported perceived issues which match both older and newer research, thus rendering the findings a point of departure for further endevours.

Along with the proliferation of high-end and performant mobile devices, we find that the inclusion of visually animated user interfaces are commonplace, but that research on their performance is scarce. Thus, for this study, eight mobile apps have been developed for scrutiny and assessment to report on the device hardware impact and penalties caused by transitions and animations, with an emphasis on apps generated using cross-platform development frameworks. The tasks we employ for animation performance measuring, are those of (i) a complex animation consisting of multiple elements, (ii) the opening sequence of a side menu navigation pattern, and (iii) a transition animation during in-app page navigation. We employ multiple performance profiling tools, and scrutinize metrics including frames per second (FPS), CPU usage, device memory usage and GPU memory usage, all to uncover the impact caused by executing transitions and animations. We uncover important differences in device hardware utilization during animations across the different cross-platform technologies employed. Additionally, Android and iOS are found to differ greatly in terms of memory consumption, CPU usage and rendered FPS, a discrepancy that is true for both the native and cross-platform apps. The findings we report are indeed factors contributing to the complexity of app development.