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.

The mobile application market is becoming increasingly fragmented with the availability of multiple mobile platforms that differ in development procedures. Developers are forced to choose to support only some platforms and specific devices due to limited development resources. To address these challenges, numerous tools have been created to aid developers in building cross-platform applications, however, there is no metric to evaluate the quality of these tools. This thesis introduces a framework for evaluating the features, performance and discuss development experience of existing and future cross-platform development tools. The framework is implemented by benchmarking several tools and the results identify a disparity in the features and performance. This research is carried out in collaboration with industrial partner Desire2Learn, through an NSERC Engage Grant. / NSERC, Desire2Learn

In mobile computing, there is variety of approaches to develop applications. One challenge is the diversity of mobile devices in the market and targeting more than one mobile device to develop applications. One approach to handle this is traditional, in which for every device there is a project carried out to develop application. Another method is the cross-platform application development which has been introduced in recent years. The purpose of this thesis is to explore if existing cross-platform frameworks can aid startup companies to develop cross-platform mobile apps. The research questions are 1) How can cross-platform frameworks be a viable approach for start-up companies in this respect? 2) What challenges and benefits do cross-platform approaches bring to developers? In order to answer the research questions, respondents from five small-sized and two large companies developing mobile apps are being interviewed. The results shows that cross-platform frameworks are good tools when developing mobile apps for multiple platforms, but are applicable to different degrees depending on the actual case. Challenges and benefits identified by the respondents mainly touched upon decreasing development time, and less coding effort, but also the uniqueness of Apple and Android products and difficulties in making developers switch to new languages.

When developing mobile applications, the tradition has been to write code specific (native) for each platform they are running on. Usually it’s about writing two separate applications for the biggest platforms, Android and iOS. There exist alternatives to this approach that uses the same code for different platforms. React Native is a relatively new cross-platform development framework that makes it possible to use the same code for application to Android and iOS. It also uses native UI-elements as a possible solution for performance issues that is often associated with cross-plattform development. This thesis evaluates React Native and compares it against native Android. The implementation is done by replicating the main functionality from a social media application written as a native Android application. However, the application is not made as an exact replica since that could limit the solutions in React Native. The evaluation is done in a Startup company and therefore focuses on aspects important in a Startup. Another issue when developing a mobile application is what type of backend that shall be used. Performance, scalability and complexity are all important aspects when choosing a framework or language as a base for the backend architecture.There do exist theoretical frameworks that could be used when building the backend. However, these frameworks require resources that are often missing in a Startup. AWS Lambda is a platform that claims to be a cost-effective way of building a scalable application. In this thesis AWS Lambda is evaluated to see if it can be used to create an automatically scaled backend for this type of social media application. The conclusion of the React Native evaluation is that it can be a suitable alternative to native Android development. If the team has previous experience in web development but lack experience in mobile application development it can be a wise choice since it removes the need to learn two frameworks in native Android and native iOS development. React Native is also good to fast create functional prototypes which can be shown to potential investors. The biggest drawback is performance in animations. However, there are often ways to work around that. In our case this drawback did not affect the user experience of the end application. The evaluation of AWS Lambda concludes that it is not for every project. In this thesis, the application was a bit too database heavy and therefore the autoscaling ability did not work properly. However, for a service that needs a lot of computing power, AWS Lambda could be a good fit. It could also be a suitable alternative if someone in the team has previous experience in the AWS environment.

For several decades, market fragmentation caused by different operating systems has been complicating and overpricing the process of creating new applications. Unified development for multiple platforms does not only save time and expenses, but also enables to reach a far wider audience. This work presents the topic of a cross-platform mobile development and analyzes the development of the market for currently the two most prevalent operating systems – Android and iOS. The results of the analysis are used to design and create a multiplatform tool intended to monitor immunopathologic reactions. The work also includes a marketing plan and expected economic valuation once the developed application is introduced to the market.

This master's thesis deals with design of cross-platform application for risk analysis support. It describes risk management in information technology and methods which can be~used for risk management with emphasis on those that can be visualized. Possibilities for cross-platform development are described subsequently. Next, application for risk analysis support is designed and implemented. In the end of this thesis is shown how to use implemented application for risk analysis.

Denna rapport jämför prestandan hos applikationer utvecklade med två olika verktyg som används för att utveckla mobilapplikationer till flera plattformar samtidigt. Verktygen som jämförs är React Native och Apache Cordova. Verktygen fungerar på olika sätt, React Native renderar applikationen genom att använda plattformsspecifika- komponenter medans Cordova renderar med hjälp av HTML5 och CSS3. Jämförelsen går till genom att utveckla tre applikationer med de båda verktygen (totalt sex applikationer) och sedan jämföra prestandan hos dessa. Testapplikationerna är framtagna för att testa funktionalitet som förekommer ofta hos applikationer idag. Testapplikation 3 testar exempelvis ett oändligt scrollande flöde, som förekommer hos både Facebook och Instagram. Resultaten visar att Cordova i dessa tester har en CPU-användning på 76% lägre än React Native och även har en minnesanvändning som är 18% lägre.

This work deals with the development of cross-platform mobile applications and compares cross-platform development frameworks. First the mobile devices market is defined and its dominant platforms are described. The main objective is to compare the frameworks with defined criteria. The theoretical part analyzes the mobile market and defines the different types of mobile devices. Further, describes the various mobile platforms, including its architecture and de-velopment environment. Subsequently, the approaches to cross-platform development are described with their individual frameworks. In the practical part the selected frameworks are compared to defined criteria and subse-quently evaluated.

The world of mobile application development faces many challenges today. Software companies want their applications available on both iOS and Android platforms to reach as many users as possible but developing for each native platform separately is time consuming and takes up unnecessary resources. This is the problem that cross-platform development frameworks aim to solve. Today the market is flooded with many cross-platform frameworks to choose from. This has led to a need for companies to identify which cross-platform framework to choose based on a framework’s strengths and weaknesses. Many methods of evaluating cross-platform frameworks have been created, but the challenge of choosing the right one still prevails. This research is aimed to investigate one of these evaluation methods, claiming to be the definitive evaluation framework. This thesis was chosen to be a case study, by cooperating with a company to get insight in the industry’s view on this evaluation framework and learn their opinion of what values are important when evaluating a development framework. The evaluation framework consists of a set of 33 criteria, each aimed at evaluating different parts of a development framework and the resulting applications. In this research, we investigate 8 of these criteria in depth and explore how these could be assigned points in an objective manner. We developed one prototype for each development framework subject to evaluation and gave these points using a system based on the evaluation framework with the added extension of defining our own sub-criteria system for assigning points as objectively as possible. From the collected data during the study we could see, not only, if the company could decide which of the development frameworks in our evaluation was more suitable for their needs. If the evaluation framework performed as intended by the creators and if this was something the company could use further on, for other projects. Results from using the proposed sub-criteria system in the evaluation are also presented and discussed.

During the last ten years the market for smartphones has grown drastically. Because of the current state of the market with different operating systems many smartphone applications need to be developed for several platforms. With this thesis, the goal was ultimately to contribute to the understanding of cross-platform development as a way of developing smartphone applications. React Native has been evaluated as a framework with which development is done for both Android and iOS using the same code. To study React Native as a framework, a smartphone application for Android and iOS was developed at an Uppsala based IT-company with expertise in web services, smartphone applications, and online gaming. Furthermore, performance tests and user tests were conducted in which React Native was compared to native applications and applications developed using Xamarin (similar cross-platform development framework owned by Microsoft). It was evident that using the same code for both Android and iOS was time saving. However, the performance tests results showed that applications developed with React Native did not perform as well as the native and Xamarin versions. Leading to the conclusion that choice of framework when developing cross-platform applications need to take into consideration performance, development time, and programming language preference.