Survey on Cross-Platforms and Languages for Mobile Apps

Nowadays mobile applications are becoming increasingly more present in our daily life, allowing people to perform several tasks through the use of smartphones, tablets or equivalent devices. Despite the great benefits in terms of innovation and in the variety of available solutions, the rapid and continuous growth of the mobile market has resulted in some fragmentation of the platforms that support each mobile device. The existence of different mobile operating systems with different programming languages and development tools can be a problem when someone wants to release an application in as many platforms as possible. The typical approach of simply rewriting the application for each one of those platforms is usually impracticable either in terms of budget or development time, requiring a bigger effort to be made. Therefore, a solution that could generate an application for several platforms (multi or cross-platform) without compromising the overall quality of the application would decrease the time to market of the application and increase enormously the number of potential users. Providentially, during the last years some effort has been conducted to tackle this problem, especially with the emergence of tools and frameworks that facilitate the development of crossplatform mobile applications. This paper focuses on these technologies and attempts to provide a global view of the actual state of this area.