Cross-platform Mobile Development Research Articles

Cotton Guard: Revolutionizing Agriculture with Smart Disease Management for Enhanced Productivity and Sustainability

Cotton stands as a pivotal crop globally, offering fibers for clothing, feed for livestock, and oil for diverse industries Nonetheless, its production faces a myriad of threats from various diseases that jeopardize yield and quality. To address this challenge, a proposed model advocates for the creation of an application merging Flutter, a cross-platform mobile development framework, and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for efficient disease identification in cotton plants. The proposed system aims to design a user-friendly interface, train a CNN model with a substantial dataset to achieve an average of 85% accuracy, integrate the model with Flutter for both online and offline disease identification, and assess the app's usability across diverse user groups. The envisioned systems hold transformative potential in Precision Agriculture, enabling swift disease identification for targeted interventions and reduced reliance on broad-spectrum pesticides. It serves as a Crop Monitoring Service for experts, aids in farmer education on cotton diseases, and contributes to research and development by collecting data on disease patterns. Furthermore, it enhances Crop Insurance Assessment, expediting claims processing with accurate disease identification. Positioned as a pioneering solution for cotton disease management, the app promises to elevate crop productivity, quality, and profitability, while concurrently enhancing the knowledge and skills of stakeholders in the agricultural sector.

Guest Editorial: Blockchain and decentralised solutions for social good

Guest Editorial: Blockchain and decentralised solutions for social good

A cross-platform mobile development for accelerating software development lifecycle

A cross-platform mobile development for accelerating software development lifecycle

Cross-platform mobile app development for disseminating public health information to travelers in Thailand: development and usability

BackgroundThe risk of disease is a key factor that travelers have identified when planning to travel abroad, as many people are concerned about getting sick. Mobile devices can be an effective means for travelers to access information regarding disease prevalence in their planned destinations, potentially reducing the risk of exposure.MethodsWe developed a mobile app, ThaiEpidemics, using cross-platform technology to provide information about disease prevalence and status for travelers to Thailand. We aimed to assess the app’s usability in terms of engagement, search logs, and effectiveness among target users. The app was developed using the principle of mobile application development life cycle, for both iOS and Android. As its data source, the app used weekly data from national disease-surveillance reports. We conduced our study among visitors to the Travel Clinic in the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, Faculty of Tropical Medicine, Mahidol University, Bangkok, Thailand. The participants were informed that the app would collect usage and search logs related to their queries. After the second log-in, the app prompted participants to complete an e-survey regarding their opinions and preferences related to their awareness of disease prevalence and status.ResultsWe based our prototype of ThaiEpidemics on a conceptualized framework for visualizing the distribution of 14 major diseases of concern to tourists in Southeast Asia. The app provided users with functions and features to search for and visualize disease prevalence and status in Thailand. The participants could access information for their current location and elsewhere in the country. In all, 83 people installed the app, and 52 responded to the e-survey. Regardless of age, education, and continent of origin, almost all e-survey respondents believed the app had raised their awareness of disease prevalence and status when travelling. Most participants searched for information for all 14 diseases; some searched for information specifically about dengue and malaria.ConclusionsThaiEpidemics is evidently potentially useful for travelers. Should the app be adopted for use by travelers to Thailand, it could have an impact on wider knowledge distribution, which might result in decreased exposure, increased prophylaxis, and therefore a potential decreased burden on the healthcare system. For app developers who are developing/implementing this kind of app, it is important to address standardization of the data source and users’ concerns about the confidentiality and safety of their mobile devices.

Decision Framework for Cross-Platform Mobile Development Frameworks Using an Integrated Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Methodology

Because of the growing popularity of smartphones and tablets, the use of mobile applications has exploded recently. However, the variety of mobile platforms compels developers to create an app for each, making the process more complex and expensive. Thus, open-source cross-platform mobile frameworks have been developed to address this problem, allowing the same code to be imported across various operating systems. This paper comes to propose a new framework for the selection of the appropriate platform for the implementation of a cross-platform mobile application. This framework is based on the most used multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods, namely analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) methods are used. A demonstrative example is proposed to illustrate the suggested methodology.

Cross-Platform Mobile Development Approaches and Frameworks

The use of mobile applications is rapidly increasing, due to rapid development of smartphones. Mobile apps, on the other hand, are platform-specific, making development more difficult and expensive. Cross platform or multiplatform application development is a fairly new idea in which developers apply a single code to create apps for several platforms like Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, iOS etc. With the rising usage of these frameworks, it is important to comprehend both contributions and limitations in this emerging field. This paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) of the research studies in the field of cross platform mobile app Development including approaches and tools. The SLR has been compiled by reviewing the research studies published between 2012-2022 in reputed venues. A Total of 22 studies has been selected and classified by using systematic process. The review has been presented on cross platform approaches, tools and challenges. Further an approach has been proposed for cross platform mobile application development. Finally, open issues and challenges in the field of cross platform have been presented to provide future direction to the researchers.

Virtual Reality Mobile Application Development with Scrum Framework as a New Media in Learning English

<span lang="EN-US">Virtual reality is a combination of technology that are used to visualize and provide interaction with virtual environment. These environment often depict three-dimensional space which could be realistic or imaginary. One of the problem to build a virtual reality application is not yet available an approach as development lifecycle to build this virtual reality application. In this study we implement a software development project management approach which is Scrum to build a virtual reality application to be a new media for learning English. The goal is to find out how this system development approach is providing a new guide as a project management to build virtual reality application right from the project started, until the application is reach production stage or final release. Also in this study we using the unity 3D to create the virtual environment and C# as the backend programming language to build a mobile application which is made this virtual application is build using cross platform mobile development. The study concludes that mobile learning applications increase student motivation and place students as the main subject in English Lessons to support the teaching and learning process in an educational context.</span>

Cross-Platform Mobile App Development in Industry: A Multiple Case-Study

Cross-platform frameworks for mobile application development are pervasive and allow developers to build applications that can operate on a spectrum of mobile platforms. With the high availability of such frameworks, it is imperative to give better understanding about the perception of industry and the challenges they face in this field. Although there are several studies in this field of research, only few research works investigate cross-platform mobile development in the industrial contexts in-depth. We conducted a qualitative research using multiple case-study approach. Interviews and focus groups methods were applied to gather information from four different software development companies in Palestine. This study aims at understanding industrial teams approach to mobile cross-platform development. In particular, it seeks to identify the challenges they face in the areas of code maintenance and software testing. Our findings cover the important aspects in industrial contexts, including the development process, as well as, how and why the cross-platform development approach is chosen. From the practitioners’ perspectives, we argue that the developers’ experience is the most influential factor in the development process. Further, our study investigates the different cross-platform technologies in the industry, and the dominant one from the practitioners’ perspectives, where they agreed that the React-Native is the promising and dominant technology. From the challenges perspective, we found that the APIs provided by the vendors are not easy to operate by developers and considered to be a major challenge. Finally, this research investigates how testing and maintenance methodologies are applied along with their challenges.

An empirical investigation of performance overhead in cross-platform mobile development frameworks

The heterogeneity of the leading mobile platforms in terms of user interfaces, user experience, programming language, and ecosystem have made cross-platform development frameworks popular. These aid the creation of mobile applications – apps – that can be executed across the target platforms (typically Android and iOS) with minimal to no platform-specific code. Due to the cost- and time-saving possibilities introduced through adopting such a framework, researchers and practitioners alike have taken an interest in the underlying technologies. Examining the body of knowledge, we, nonetheless, frequently encounter discussions on the drawbacks of these frameworks, especially with regard to the performance of the apps they generate. Motivated by the ongoing discourse and a lack of empirical evidence, we scrutinised the essential piece of the cross-platform frameworks: the bridge enabling cross-platform code to communicate with the underlying operating system and device hardware APIs. The study we present in the article benchmarks and measures the performance of this bridge to reveal its associated overhead in Android apps. The development of the artifacts for this experiment was conducted using five cross-platform development frameworks to generate Android apps, in addition to a baseline native Android app implementation. Our results indicate that – for Android apps – the use of cross-platform frameworks for the development of mobile apps may lead to decreased performance compared to the native development approach. Nevertheless, certain cross-platform frameworks can perform equally well or even better than native on certain metrics which highlights the importance of well-defined technical requirements and specifications for deliberate selection of a cross-platform framework or overall development approach.

A Systematic Mapping Study of Cross-Platform Mobile Apps

Cross-platform frameworks for mobile Application (app) development allow developers to deploy solutions on a range of platforms such as iOS and Android. With the increased use of such frameworks, it is of utmost importance to understand the contributions and challenges in this emergent field. Although there have been many studies in this area of research, there is a lack of a coherent view. To address this issue, we have conducted a Systematic Mapping Study (SMS) to categorize the available studies in the area of cross-platform mobile app development. More specifically, we aim to understand the accomplishments, contribution facets and the challenges presented in this field. Thirty (30) studies are mapped to a classification scheme. Different research gaps are identified: more research needs to be conducted using more complex and real-world apps; the point of how cross-platform apps are identified and distinguished from the native is still not clarified; and we argue that there should be more research contribution in the particular area of testing and maintenance.

An Empirical Study of Cross-Platform Mobile Development in Industry

The purpose of this study is to report on the industry’s perspectives and opinions on cross-platform mobile development, with an emphasis on the popularity, adoption, and arising issues related to the use of technical development frameworks and tools. We designed and conducted an online survey questionnaire, for which 101 participants were recruited from various developer-oriented online forums and websites. A total of five questions are reported in this study, of which two employed a Likert scale instrument, while three were based on multiple choice. In terms of technical frameworks, we find that PhoneGap, the Ionic Framework, and React Native were the most popular in use, both in hobby projects and in professional settings. The participants report an awareness of trade-offs when embracing cross-platform technologies and consider penalties in performance and user experience to be expected. This is also in line with what is reported in academic research. We find patterns in the reported perceived issues which match both older and newer research, thus rendering the findings a point of departure for further endevours.

Investigation of methodical framework for cross-platform mobile application development: significance of Codename One

Mobile application development landscape is changing very rapidly with developers moving from traditional approach to 'write once, run anywhere'. In any case, most mobile applications have comparable performance such as tight project schedules, budget, and the need to bolster both Android and iOS. For most developers, particularly those that are migrating from web to mobile applications, cross-platform mobile application tools are often preferred as new development tools that promise some native-like functionalities and performance. However, they often ask questions like which cross-platform development tool to choose?, and which framework is easier, better and supports our requirements? This paper presents answers to these questions by evaluating some popular cross-platform mobile applications development tools. Towards the end, this paper recommends Codename One for cross-platform mobile applications developers because of its unique strengths and significance.

A Survey and Taxonomy of Core Concepts and Research Challenges in Cross-Platform Mobile Development

Developing applications targeting mobile devices is a complex task involving numerous options, technologies, and trade-offs, mostly due to the proliferation and fragmentation of devices and platforms. As a result of this, cross-platform app development has enjoyed the attention of practitioners and academia for the previous decade. Throughout this review, we assess the academic body of knowledge and report on the state of research on the field. We do so with a particular emphasis on core concepts, including those of user experience, device features, performance, and security. Our findings illustrate that the state of research demand for empirical verification of an array of unbacked claims, and that a particular focus on qualitative user-oriented research is essential. Through our outlined taxonomy and state of research overview, we identify research gaps and challenges, and provide numerous suggestions for further research.

An Evaluation of Cross-Platform Frameworks for Multimedia Mobile Applications Development

Cross-Platform Mobile Development Tools allows developers to write a unique base code and create the same application for multiple mobile platforms (e.g., Android and iOS). A variety of frameworks have been proposed to support cross-platform mobile application development. PhoneGap, Sencha Touch, and Titanium are well-known frameworks designed for this purpose. The main goal of this research is to analyze their current state of maturity. In that direction, an application was developed in PhoneGap, Titanium, and Sencha, as well as native versions for Android and iOS were implemented. Such mobile application obtain information from sensors, uses camera to take pictures, applies image filters, and establishes connection to a remote Web Service. We analyzed the feasibility to build this kind of mobile application, the performance of each version, and the development effort. With our results, we intend to provide an overview of the qualities and limitations of these frameworks.

Enhanced Code Conversion Approach for the Integrated Cross-Platform Mobile Development (ICPMD)

Mobile development companies aim to maximize the return on investments by making their mobile applications (Apps) available on different mobile platforms. Consequently, the same App is developed several times; each time the developer uses the programming languages and development tools of a specific platform. Therefore, there is a need to have cross-platform mobile applications development solutions that enable the developers to develop the App once and run it everywhere. The Integrated Cross-Platform Mobile Applications Development (ICPMD) solution is one of the attempts that enables the developers to use the most popular programming languages like Java for Android and C# for Windows Phone 8 (WP8). ICPMD is used to transform both the source code and user interface to another language to generate full Apps on the target platform. This paper extends ICPMD by proposing a new code conversion approach based on XSLT and Regular Expressions to ease the conversion process. In addition, it provides the assessment method to compare the ICPMD efficiency with competing approaches. Several Apps are converted from WP8 to Android and vice versa. The ICPMD evaluation results show reasonable improvement over commercial cross-platform mobile development tools (Titanium and Xamarin).

An empirical analysis of energy consumption of cross-platform frameworks for mobile development

The increasing fragmentation of mobile devices market has created the problem of supporting all the possible mobile platforms to reach the highest number of potential users. One possible solution is to use cross-platform frameworks, that let develop only one application that is then deployed to all the supported target platforms. Currently available cross-platform frameworks follow different approaches to deploy the final application, and all of them has pros and cons. In this paper, we evaluate and compare together the current frameworks for cross-platform mobile development considering one of the most important aspect when dealing with mobile devices: energy consumption. Our analysis shows and measure how the adoption of cross-platform frameworks impacts energy consumption with respect to the native mobile development, identifies which are the most consuming tasks, and tries to define a final rank among all the different approaches. Moreover, we highlight future development necessary to improve performances of cross-platform frameworks to reach native development performances.

Cross-platform Mobile Development Based on MDA Approach

Nowadays, the mobile operating systems market (Android, IOS, Windows Phone …) continues to grow. It has become a real challenge for application vendors to provide versatile applications in this competitive market in a short time. The challenge is even greater if the application is planned for multiple platforms whose the operating systems uses different technologies, namely, IOS/Objective-C environment for the Phone and the IPad, Java SDK for Android, etc. This fragmentation makes mobile application development rather difficult and very expensive, hence the use of cross-platform development. To address the cross-platform development different approach exist, the choice was focused on the MDA approach whose principle is the elaboration of various UML models. By studying in detail various target platforms on the basis of a set of criteria and performing a model for each criterion, the aim of our research work is to elaborate a meta-model from UML models realized for each platform.

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.

IJARCCE - Computer and Communication Engineering

The demand for cross platform mobile development is constantly growing in the market. The basic need for programmers on any platform is compatibility. There are various cross-browser tools that will take any developer a long way in creating flexible apps that stand the compatibility test such as Whoop, Mosync, Phonegap, Appcelator etc. Phonegap is one of the most developer friendly tools present in the market which provide a good range of native APIs and platforms. This paper deals with the available approaches of building a cross-platform application using phonegap.

Mobile-cloud Cross Development (McX)

There is a multitude of Mobile Operating Systems (MOSs) with iOS, Android, Windows Phone and, BlackBerry leading the space. New players continue to enter the market. Without a de-facto leader in this space, it has become necessary for businesses & developers to target multiple devices & MOSs in order to establish a relevant presence within their target audience. Cross-platform Mobile Development Tools (XMTs) were born out of this need to reduce developer effort in creating mobile applications by providing “write once run anywhere” (WORA) functionality. However, most of these tools sacrifice performance, features or maintainability in order to provide WORA functionality. Furthermore, these tools only attempt to manage the user interface and related client-side functionality. Most mobile applications need to follow the same principals that guide development of non-mobile web or desktop apps. Typical apps are deployed using an n-tier, cloud-based strategy with substantial functionality delegated to cloud resources. Given the above, there are two parts of an application’s anatomy that don’t get much attention – the cloud middleware functionality, and the database/model management features. In this paper I address these problems through creation of a Mobile-cloud Cross Development (McX) tool-chain that includes a type-safe meta-programming language, an integrated cloud node and, an active compiler. In order to effectively understand the problem with the current state of the art, I use 3 of the leading XMTs alongside the developed McX tool-chain and compare the effectiveness of each. The paper further introduces the language; it’s grammar and semantic structure, and provides discussions on how this approach fits the future of cross-platform, cloud-integrated mobile application development along with the associated issues and areas for further research.