Towards the Quality Improvement of Cross-Platform Mobile Applications

Abstract

During last ten years, the number of smartphonesand mobile applications has been constantly growing. Android, iOS and Windows Mobile are three mobile platforms that coveralmost all smartphones in the world in 2017. Developing a mobileapp involves first to choose the platforms the app will run, andthen to develop specific solutions (i.e., native apps) for eachchosen platform using platform-related toolkits such as AndroidSDK. A cross-platform mobile application is an app that runs ontwo or more mobile platforms. Several frameworks have beenproposed to simplify the development of cross-platform mobileapplications and to reduce development and maintenance costs. They are called cross-platform mobile app development frameworks. However, to our knowledge, the life-cycle and the quality of cross-platformsmobile applications built using those frameworks havenot been studied in depth. Our main goal is to first study theprocesses of development and maintenance of mobile applicationsbuilt using cross-platform mobile app development frameworks, focusing particularly on the bug-fixing activity. Then, we aim atdefining tools for automated repairing bugs from cross-platformmobile applications.