Taxonomy of Cross-Platform Mobile Applications Development Approaches

Abstract

The developers use the cross-platform mobile development solutions to develop the mobile application once and run it on many platforms. Many of these cross-platform solutions are still under research and development. Also, these solutions are based on different approaches such as Cross-Compilation approach, Virtual Machine approach, and Web-Based approach. There are many survey papers about the cross-platform mobile development solutions but they do not include the most recent approaches, including Component-Based approach, Cloud-Based approach, and Merged approach. The main aim of this paper is helping the researchers to know the most recent approaches and the open research issues. This paper surveys the existing cross-platform mobile development approaches and attempts to provide a global view: it thoroughly introduces a comprehensive categorization to the cross-platform approaches, defines the pros and cons of each approach, explains sample solutions per approach, compares the cross-platform mobile development solutions, and ends with the open research areas.