Survey, comparison and evaluation of cross platform mobile application development tools

Mobile application development is becoming more challenging with diverse platforms and their software development kits. In order to reduce the cost of development and reach out to maximum users across several platforms, developers are migrating to cross platform application development tools. In this paper, we provide several decision criteria beyond the portability concerns for choosing suitable cross platform tool for application development. The desirable requirements in a cross platform framework are identified. A general architecture for cross platform application development is discussed. Then a survey of several write once run anywhere tools (PhoneGap, Titanium, Sencha Touch) are provided along with a classification and comparison among the tools. To examine the performance in terms of CPU, memory usage, power consumption, Android test applications are developed using such tools. It is found that PhoneGap consumes less memory, CPU and power since it does not included dedicated UI components. Finally the paper summarizes the contributions and concludes with some future directions.