A Rule-Based Approach for UI Migration from Android to iOS

TL;DR

This paper introduces GUIMIGRATOR, a novel rule-based system that automates the migration of Android UIs to iOS, reducing manual effort and avoiding recognition errors inherent in vision-based methods.

Contribution

GUIMIGRATOR is the first approach to automatically convert Android UI layouts into iOS code using layout parsing and template-based code generation, bypassing image recognition.

Findings

Achieves 78 UI similarity score in migration tasks.

Migrates UIs in approximately 7.6 seconds per application.

Outperforms existing large language models in UI similarity metrics.

Abstract

In the mobile development process, creating the user interface (UI) is highly resource intensive. Consequently, numerous studies have focused on automating UI development, such as generating UI from screenshots or design specifications. However, they heavily rely on computer vision techniques for image recognition. Any recognition errors can cause invalid UI element generation, compromising the effectiveness of these automated approaches. Moreover, developing an app UI from scratch remains a time consuming and labor intensive task. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach called GUIMIGRATOR, which enables the cross platform migration of existing Android app UIs to iOS, thereby automatically generating UI to facilitate the reuse of existing UI. This approach not only avoids errors from screenshot recognition but also reduces the cost of developing UIs from scratch. GUIMIGRATOR extracts and parses Android UI layouts, views, and resources to construct a UI skeleton tree. GUIMIGRATOR generates the final UI code files utilizing target code templates, which are then compiled and validated in the iOS development platform, i.e., Xcode. We evaluate the effectiveness of GUIMIGRATOR on 31 Android open source applications across ten domains. The results show that GUIMIGRATOR achieves a UI similarity score of 78 between migration screenshots, outperforming two popular existing LLMs substantially. Additionally, GUIMIGRATOR demonstrates high efficiency, taking only 7.6 seconds to migrate the datasets. These findings indicate that GUIMIGRATOR effectively facilitates the reuse of Android UI code on iOS, leveraging the strengths of both platforms UI frameworks and making new contributions to cross platform development.