Towards the quality improvement of cross-platform mobile applications

TL;DR

This paper investigates the development and maintenance processes of cross-platform mobile applications, focusing on bug fixing, and proposes tools for automated bug repair to improve quality.

Contribution

It provides an in-depth study of cross-platform app lifecycle and introduces automated bug repair tools for these applications.

Findings

Cross-platform apps have unique development challenges.

Bug fixing is a significant part of app maintenance.

Automated repair tools can enhance app quality.

Abstract

During last ten years, the number of smartphones and mobile applications has been constantly growing. Android, iOS and Windows Mobile are three mobile platforms that cover almost all smartphones in the world in 2017. Developing a mobile app involves first to choose the platforms the app will run, and then to develop specific solutions (i.e., native apps) for each chosen platform using platform-related toolkits such as AndroidSDK. Across-platform mobile application is an app that runs on two or more mobile platforms. Several frameworks have been proposed to simplify the development of cross-platform mobile applications 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-platforms mobile applications built using those frameworks have not been studied in depth. Our main goal is to first study the processes of development and maintenance of mobile applications built using cross-platform mobile app development frameworks, focusing particularly on the bug-fixing activity. Then, we aim at defining tools for automated repairing bugs from cross-platform mobile applications.