COMPARING CROSS-PLATFORM DEVELOPMENT APPROACHES FOR MOBILE APPLICATIONS Henning Heitkötter, Sebastian Hanschke and Tim A. Majchrzak Department of Information Systems, University of Münster, Münster, Germany

Criteria of the infrastructure perspective 2  License and Costs  Supported Platforms  Access to advanced device-specific features  Long-term feasibility  Look and feel  Application Speed  Distribution

Criteria of the development perspective 3  Development environment  Ease of installation  GUI Design  Ease of development  Maintainability  Scalability  Opportunities for further development  Speed and Cost of Development

Evaluation of mobile Web applications – Infrastructure perspective 4  License and Costs  Fees may apply for using specific JavaScript frameworks  jQuery Mobile  Nevertheless, selling support packages is a typical business model for open-source software. Moreover, costs may occur from hosting  3

Evaluation of mobile Web applications – Infrastructure perspective 5  Supported Platforms  All smartphone platforms have their own native browser  Their implementations differ slightly resulting in minor variation of displaying the user interface  1  Access to advanced device-specific features  JavaScript does not permit any hardware access on smartphones  5

Evaluation of mobile Web applications – Infrastructure perspective 6  Long-term feasibility  HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are well established techniques undergoing steady improvement and development  The decision for a specific JavaScript framework can however turn out to be problematic because changing the framework later-on is in most cases expensive  1

Evaluation of mobile Web applications – Infrastructure perspective 7  Look and feel  Design and layout of apps depend on CSS  CSS Theme for iPhone  There are major differences in the usage philosophy of a Web site and an app  By using a manifest file a Web site can request to keep an offline copy, concepts like WebStorage allow Web sites to save data in the local storage.  4

Evaluation of mobile Web applications – Infrastructure perspective 8  Application Speed  Due to the fact that a Web app has to be loaded via the Internet, launching the app may be slow  Still, the authors’ experiments with this approach have shown that especially with a high number of animations and large amounts of content an app can easily reach the limit of a smartphone’s CPU  3

Evaluation of mobile Web applications – Infrastructure perspective 9  Distribution  Distributing a Web app is simple  One could package the Web app via PhoneGap or Titanium;  This is not permitted in Apple’s app store as there is no additional benefit compared to loading it in a browser (Apple, 2010).  3

Evaluation of mobile Web applications – Development perspective. 10  Development environment  There are several development environments for developing with HTML, CSS and JavaScript  For a first impression, a desktop-browser might be enough  In most cases tools like Firebug (2011) can be employed in addition to a regular browser  2

Evaluation of mobile Web applications – Development perspective. 11  GUI Design  Most tools for Web UI design offer WYSIWYG editors  As the Web app can rapidly be reloaded on the target device without having to recompile it, GUI design is comparably fast  1

Evaluation of mobile Web applications – Development perspective. 12  Ease of development  HTML, CSS, and JavaScript  display size, Web storage, limited CPU and GPU speed  2  Maintainability  A good JavaScript framework enables short and elegant code.  1

Evaluation of mobile Web applications – Development perspective. 13  Scalability  Web apps in general can easily be split into a large number of small files that fit into the overall design  Tend to become confusing from a certain size  2  Opportunities for further development  1  Speed and Cost of Development  Development tools are technically mature, debugging and testing and the design of the user interface can therefore be carried out fast and cost-efficient  1

Evaluation of PhoneGap – Infrastructure perspective 14  License and Costs  Both PhoneGap and jQuery Mobile are open source software  Nitobi, the company behind PhoneGap, earns money by selling support packages from USD 25 to USD 2000 per month  2

Evaluation of PhoneGap – Infrastructure perspective 15  Supported Platforms  PhoneGap supports seven mobile platforms  As PhoneGap uses a WebView and the WebKit library to display the user interface  2  Access to advanced device-specific features  2

Evaluation of PhoneGap – Infrastructure perspective 16  Long-term feasibility  As both PhoneGap and jQuery Mobile are comparatively young projects  2  Look and feel  In contrast to apps developed with Titanium Mobile or natively but similar to Web apps, PhoneGap does not use native user interface elements  3

Evaluation of PhoneGap – Infrastructure perspective 17  Application Speed  Launching a PhoneGap app is fast and user interaction is smooth  Even a large number of tasks did not influence the prototype’s performance, which is comparable to a native app  1  Distribution  2

Evaluation of PhoneGap – Development perspective. 18  Development environment  After providing the source of a PhoneGap app, apps are compiled and signed for all chosen platforms and can easily be downloaded  2  GUI Design  Adobe Dreamweaver  1

Evaluation of PhoneGap – Development perspective. 19  Ease of development  PhoneGap’s documentation is clearly structured  It provides numerous examples  2  Maintainability  Except for additional code that accesses the hardware, hybrid apps do not require more lines of code than comparable Web apps.  1

Evaluation of PhoneGap – Development perspective. 20  Scalability  2  Opportunities for further development  2  Speed and Cost of Development  1

Evaluation of Titanium – Infrastructure perspective 21  License and Costs  5  Supported Platforms  iOS, Android.  4  Access to advanced device-specific features  As with PhoneGap  2

Evaluation of Titanium – Infrastructure perspective 22  Long-term feasibility  3  Look and feel  2  Application Speed  5  Distribution  2

Evaluation of Titanium – Development perspective 23  Development environment  fastdev server  developers to dynamically reload JavaScript source and resources from an external server  fastdev is only available for Android and has some minor bugs  3  GUI Design  Titanium Mobile does not offer a WYSIWYG editor  Requires quite a lot of API commands  4

Evaluation of Titanium – Development perspective 24  Ease of development  3  Maintainability  The prototype developed with Titanium has comparatively many lines of code  3  Scalability  Ti.include()  2

Evaluation of Titanium – Development perspective 25  Opportunities for further development  Source code of apps written for Titanium, at most with the exception of an application’s inner logic, can in general not be used with other approaches due to the fact that a large amount of Titanium-specific functions is used.  5  Speed and Cost of Development  5