Frameworks for developing cross-platform applications come in many forms, and depending on thefunctionality of the developed application, some platforms may be a better choice. Applications workingwith point cloud models consist of huge amounts of data points, created by scanning an objectwith a laser scanner which can then be loaded into the software for display and interaction.This study looks at performance differences between two cross-platform desktop application frameworks,Qt and Electron, working with point clouds by performing an experiment. Two prototypeswere used to measure the differences in the time it takes to create the point cloud, allocated memoryfor the data points, and also the average frames per second achieved throughout a rotation sequenceinitiated on the point cloud. This study is conducted on-sight at an organization currently using theQt framework and wanted to investigate potential differences with an HTML5 framework. This studyalso investigates what expert practitioners working with the Qt framework experience its strength andlimitations are, by conducting semi-structured interviews to gain in-depth knowledge.This study found that the differences between the frameworks can not be drawn clearly, as thereare a lot of variables influencing performance outcomes. However, under these conditions Qt generallyperformed better on all occasions. Performance is one way to measure an application and framework,and this study found that working with the Qt framework has its strong points as well as weaknesses.The performance and cross-platform capabilities of Qt are well-liked, but it can come at the cost ofpoor documentation and high complexity of developing bigger applications. Using QtQuick (QML) todevelop the GUI is generally appreciated for how it separates the front-end GUI from C++ togetherwith the available modules. However, it can take time to learn QML and may not completely removethe need of C++ development.

Today, there are a handful of different platforms for mobile phones. Writing an application natively for each mobile operating system is time consuming and expensive. This situation has created a need for using cross-platform frameworks, that allow programmers to create an application once and run it on all platforms. The problem is that it is not certain whether cross-platform apps can fully replace native ones, or if by using cross-platform tools some desired qualities are lost. Investigating this issue would allow to find out which one of these two application development methods is better, or in which situation it is better to choose one over the other. Such knowledge would allow to decrease development time and costs. Companies that create mobile applications on a daily basis have expertise in this area. Thus, thirteen interviews were done with thirteen distinct businesses in order to research this problem. The results showed that native development produces higher quality applications, but there are some situations where it might be better to use cross-platform frameworks.

This thesis will address problems of cross-platform software development for mobile devices. The author will analyze existing frameworks and tools; he will point out their major strengths and weaknesses. Based on this analysis, a pilot cross-platform application will be designed and implemented using the most versatile framework. Particular attention will be paid to the methodology of cross-platform development.

This thesis describes research of plug-in frameworks, their application and benefits and also a way to develop cross-platform GUI applications in Xamarin with Xamarin.Forms. It describes also the limitations that mobile systems set on plug-in frameworks. The result of the thesis is a basic and extensible platform for building GUI applications based on the MVVM design pattern with modularity and extensibility of MEF 2.0.

Android is a fast growing platform with a lot of users and applications on the market. In order to challenge the competition, a new software product should be designed carefully, conforming to the platform constraints and conveying to the user expectations. This research focuses on defining a suitable architecture design for the specific use case of interest, an Android application focused on location based data. The research process is backed up by a prototype application construction with features such as location based reminders and mobile communication with web services. Moreover, an analysis has been conducted on existing products with the proven quality, to extract information on current best practice implementations of several interesting features. Furthermore, the demand for targeting multiple platforms with the same application motivated a research on portability and reuse of code among different platforms. The constructed system is divided into a client-server pair. Opposite to the client (mobile) side, the server side analyzes the process of extending an existing architecture by integrating it with a web service project used for exchanging data with the mobile devices. Finally, the thesis is not strictly constrained to the given use case because it presents several general concepts of application design through architectural and design patterns.

Den här studien undersöker för- och nackdelar med att migrera existerande mobilaapplikationer till Xamarins crossplatform ramverk Xamarin Forms. Metoden somanvänts för att samla in data är inom ramen för forskningsparadigmet Design Science.En prototyp har utvecklats med syftet att undersöka vad som är möjligt att migrera tillXamarin Forms. Prototyputvecklingen har dokumenterats i loggböcker som sedananalyserats som kvalitativ data. Två intervjuer har även genomförts med andraxamarinutvecklare med syftet att nå en djupare förståelse för ämnet. Studien harproducerat ett flödesschema för när ett beslut om att migrera en existerande applikationtill Xamarin Forms bör tas. Vid beslut om migration har vi även formulerat ett antalriktlinjer som bör efterföljas för att uppnå bra resultat. Flödesschemat och riktlinjerna ärbaserade på resultaten från analysen av loggböckerna och intervjuerna. / This study investigates the pros and cons of migraiting existing mobile applications toXamarins crossplatform framework Xamarin Forms. The method that is being used tocollect data is within the scope of the research paradigm Design Science. A prototype ofan existing mobile application has been developed in order to research the possibilitiesof migraiting existing applications to Xamarin Forms. The development process of theprototype has been documented in journals which later were to be analyzed asqualitative data. Two interviews have been done with other Xamarin developers in orderto get a deeper understanding of the subject. This study produced a flowchart that is tobe used when deciding about a migration of an existing mobile application aswell asguidelines for the migration itself. The flowchart and guidelines are based on analyzingthe data from our journals aswell as our interviews with other developers.

In this thesis, the newly released framework Ionic 2, which claims to fix the problems cross platform frameworks has suffered from concerning bad performance and bad user experience, has been evaluated. The study has focused on the Android platform by comparing a native developed application to an Ionic 2 developed application. The comparison has been made on performance and user experience. As an extent, Ionic 2 are also compared to another evaluation study made for React Native, to see how the two frameworks differ, both performance wise and user experience wise. The native application performs better in all performance tests, even though the difference only was a few percent for memory usage and battery consumption. In the user tests, the result was of different nature. Some users did not notice any differences between the applications, whilst some had big concerns with how the application behaved. The overall conclusion is that Ionic still has some way to go to compete with native applications. If considering using Ionic 2, you need to be aware of the flaws it has. From the data gathered for this study, React Native is considered to be better than Ionic, but with new updates coming continuously, Ionic is improving every day.

A big problem with mobile application development is that the mobile market is divided amongst several platforms. Because of this, development time gets longer, more development skills are needed and the application gets harder to maintain. A solution to this is cross-platform development, which allows you to develop an application for several platforms at the same time. Since September 2015 the cross-platform framework React Native, created by Facebook, has been available for public use. This thesis evaluates React Native, for both Android and iOS, in regards to performance, platform code sharing as well as look and feel. An application was developed for both platforms, one version using the native language and one version using React Native. The different versions were compared through automated test scenarios to evaluate performance, manual code review for platform code sharing and with a user study to evaluate the look and feel. The results show promise as the user study shows that the React Native versions of the application have similar user experiences as their native counterparts without significantly affecting performance. The results also show that for the specified application about 75% of the React Native code could be used for both platforms, while it was easy to add platform-specific code.

Xamarin, a cross-platform development framework, was used in this project for the development of a proof-of-concept mobile client application for an existing intranet solution. The intranet consists of Microsoft SharePoint components and is a pre-assembled product produced by the requestor of this project; Sogeti. To fetch the intranet’s data, a web API was implemented as an intermediary between the mobile application and the intranet. The Xamarin application targets three different mobile platforms including iOS, Android and Universal Windows Platform, and since Xamarin allows for shared logic between different operating systems, this approach was adopted to the greatest extent possible. However, during the development of the project several problems were encountered that prompted platform-specific implementations. For example, the user authentication process needed to be implemented in a platform-specific manner in the client application and some parts of the graphical user interface needed to be adapted to each individual platform as well. Even though the development of the applications was not completely finished, four out of seven of the original requirements set forth by Sogeti at the beginning of the project were achieved. These fulfilled requirements include, among other functionality, the implementation of displaying news articles and attention messages from a user’s specific intranet solution. Overall, the project was found to be successful, especially with regard to evaluating how well Xamarin and cross-platform development works with these kinds of mobile applications.

Creating smartphone applications for more than one operating system requires knowledge of several code languages, more code maintenance, higher development costs and longer development time. To make this easier cross-platform tools (CPTs) exist. But using a CPT can decrease performance of the application. Applications with low performance are more likely to get uninstalled and this makes developers lose income. There are four main CPT approaches hybrid, interpreter, web and cross-compiler. Each has different disadvantages .and advantages. This study will examine the performance difference between two CPTs, Codename One and PhoneGap. The performance measurements, CPU load, memory usage, energy consumption, time execution and application size will be made to compare the CPTs. If cross-compilers have better performance than other CPT approaches will also be investigated. An experiment where three applications are created with native Android, Codename One and PhoneGap will be made and performance measurements will be made. A literature study with research from IEEE and Engineering village will be conducted on different CPT approaches. PhoneGap performed best with shortest execution time, least energy consumption and least CPU usage while Codename One had smallest application size and least memory usage. The research available on performance for CPTs is short and not well done. The difference between PhoneGap and Codename One is not big except for writing to SQLite. No basis was found for the statement that cross-compilers have better performance than other CPT approaches.