Classification of existing mobile cross-platform approaches and proposal of decision support criteria

Abstract

The smartphone market has known an exponential growth since 2007, with the apparition of the first Apple phone. Nowadays, developing an application that targets all existing mobile platforms, becomes a tedious task for developers, due to the diversity of mobile platforms, their tools. For that, cross-platform approach with its various sub-approaches has shown its strength in reducing project's cost and time respecting the slogan 'develop once and deploy everywhere'. This paper aims to compare the mobile app development's approaches and suggests a decisional framework to choose the adequate one to get an application respecting the client's need with a low cost and time. This framework's criteria have a huge impact on the eventual cost, time, and success of an application building. If developers fail to match the demands of an app with the right development approach, it can turn their project into a certain failure.