Do academia and industry agree? : A study on how cross-platform research aligns with the concerns of developers

The number of available mobile applications (or apps) as well as the usage of these are rapidly increasing. With this increase there naturally also follows an increased competitiveness in the app market, with developers needing to produce apps of high perceived quality in order to get return users and also needing to make their apps available to multiple different platforms and devices. With substantial platform and device fragmentation, this is often a difficult and costly task. While traditionally an app basically had to be build from scratch for each platform it needed to support, in later years alternative development techniques for what is called cross-platform development have emerged and seen a rapid increase in usage. Contrary to native development, cross-platform development aims to enable development of a single codebase that can then run on all platforms. The idea is that this would save development time and thereby cost. Academic literature was found to often evaluate and compare performance differences between apps developed with cross-platform frameworks and their natively developed counterparts. Typically, these studies reported several reoccurring drawbacks with cross-platform development, compared to native development. However, research within the field was found to be lacking in regard to developers’ experience in general, and specifically whether this focus on comparing performance and listing pros and cons was representative of the concerns of industry developers. This study aimed to begin filling this gap, byinvestigating the extent to which these developers were relating any drawbacks to cross-platform development as well as which these were. Also, the study sought to answer how big a part this awareness of drawbacks played in the decision when developers chose to develop natively instead of cross-platform. With this, the goal of the study was ultimately to discussthe state of cross-platform research and whether it focused on aspects that were relevant to the industry. Data in this study was gathered in two ways: (1) a literature study, aiming to get an image of the current state of cross-platform research and (2) a web survey, in which app developers were invited through various groups in Facebook and Reddit. Ultimately, the results indicated that industry developers were to a large extent relating the same drawbacks to cross-platform development as were found to be frequently reported by academia. Further, all of the survey participants that related drawbacks to cross-platform development and ever chose to develop natively instead of cross-platform, did so to a very large degree because of those drawbacks. There were limitations to both the planning and the execution of the methods that were used, primarily in the gathering of data but also the analysis of this. However, it was still deemed possible to conclude that the results of the study indicated that research regarding cross-platform development could reasonably keep its current focus moving forward, as this appeared to be of high relevance to the industry.