University Report: Challenges in Cross-Platform Mobile App Development

This report explores the challenges inherent in developing cross-platform mobile applications, examining the difficulties developers encounter when creating apps compatible with multiple operating systems. It investigates the research question, "What are the suitable strategies for avoiding the potential challenges faced by developers while creating cross-platform mobile apps?" The report analyzes various aspects, including performance issues, platform compatibility, code reuse, and the impact of different frameworks like React Native and PhoneGap. It also touches upon ethical, professional, legal, social, and environmental considerations related to cross-platform app development. The research identifies strategies to mitigate these challenges, such as careful planning, code reuse, and understanding the advantages and disadvantages of different development approaches. The conclusion emphasizes the importance of considering these factors to ensure successful and efficient cross-platform mobile app development.

Running head: CHALLENGES IN CROSS PLATFORM MOBILE APP DEVELOPMENT
Challenges in Cross Platform Mobile App Development
Name of student
Name of University
Author’s Note

1CHALLENGES IN CROSS PLATFORM MOBILE APP DEVELOPMENT
Coursework-2
“What are the suitable strategies for avoiding the potential challenges faced by developers
while creating cross-platform mobile apps?”
Abstract
Developers have used various technologies to build an app. Even today, developing a cross-
platform mobile app, there are several challenges faced by the developer. Thus, it is the right
time to approach some strategies to avoid those potential challenges that the developers are
facing. Throughout this paper, the user will experience and trumps the strategies to avoid the
challenges potentially faced by the developer while developing cross-platform mobile apps. It
has been examined in the research paper about the challenges and drawbacks of developing the
cross-platform mobile application. Also, it carries out the proposed research question and
providing the relevant ethical, professional, legal, social and environmental issues based on the
application.
Introduction
Creating a cross-platform mobile application that works on multiple platforms grows the
trend of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) in the business world (Ciman and Gaggi 2017). It
enables the businesses to develop a corporate mobile app that can operate on different operating
system and network. The cross-platform mobile application development use tools for scripting
that include common languages of JavaScript, HTML and CSS (Wang et al. 2017). However,
this application has certain drawbacks. Through the recent survey, it has revealed that native
development could be out of business if cross-platform were a universal platform. One,
therefore, was much more satisfied with the launch of PhoneGap. Users get the choice between

2CHALLENGES IN CROSS PLATFORM MOBILE APP DEVELOPMENT
iOS and Android as a personal preference. Thus the problem has to mitigate to multiplatform
once the user knows about the advantage and disadvantage of using a cross-platform mobile app.
This paper will identify the major challenges faced by the cross-platform mobile-app developer.
Therefore, the investigation done for this study will aim at exploring the research question
“What are the suitable strategies for avoiding the potential challenges faced by developers
while creating cross-platform mobile apps?”, and discussing the relevant ethical, professional,
legal, social and environmental issues.
Related Work
In the further research, some strategies have been applied to avoid the challenges by
considering the advantages and disadvantages of the cross-platform mobile app development by
(El-Kassas et al. 2017). In one of the article, it has revealed that the modern HTML and CSS has
an advanced feature such as gradients that requires a lot of GPU and CPU resources which
consumes more battery as compared to the native cross-platform developer (Vakintis and
Panagiotakis 2016). Then later the author did some Careful planning in code reuse across-
platforms that reduce the cost and results in faster development. Thus, the user can fix the bug
that has found in the common codebase. Instead of using a learning platform of specific
development language, the user can use the existing programming (De Andrade et al. 2015).
Context
There have been several issues identified with the research question to carry out the
ethical, professional, legal, social and environmental issues. As going through the research paper,
it was found that in contrast to the cross-platform hybrid development, a solution has been
provided with single codebase multiple platforms (Seppälä and Yajima 2017). The emerging

3CHALLENGES IN CROSS PLATFORM MOBILE APP DEVELOPMENT
technology of React Native by Facebook provides hybrid tools through which a cross-platform
application would develop and will be used in both iOS and Android (Majchrzak and Grønli
2017). In the research paper, it was found that to update an app; the user does not need any legal
approval for each app in the app store. When installing the application that has developed with
hybrid technology on the mobile devices, it leverages an interpreted code like React Native
(Gaouar, Benamar and Bendimerad 2016). The technology of React Native fetches the new code
at the installation of the application. It also becomes a professional issue as codes have been
leaked out. Since the existing code is handled by the Web, there is no need for any API
development. The mobile app developers inherently optimise the performance as the non-
optimized DOM structure, bad handling of items list, unsuitable image scaling appear to be a bad
performance of cross-platform apps and raise the social issue with the user (Allen et al. 2016).
There is no such ethical issue within the context of the research question.
Analysis
While analysing the development of the cross-platform mobile app, there have been
certain challenges faced by the developer. There is a different platform for mobile devices that
need an approach towards the use of correct design. It has unified marketing, with limited time
and it also reduces the cost. In the early year of 2015, the Facebook introduced a React Native to
the development community (Biørn-Hansen and Ghinea 2018). The component created by the
React Native allows the developer to use in both the iOS and Android devices. During the period
from 2000 to 2015, it has been noticed that continuously new mobile devices in the market were
emerging (Lamberton and Stephen 2016). One of the most widespread technologies presently is
the PhoneGap that uses JavaScript or HTML5 as a development tool for the cross-platform
development (Dhillon and Mahmoud 2015). It becomes easy and faster for the developer to

4CHALLENGES IN CROSS PLATFORM MOBILE APP DEVELOPMENT
develop an app with an average of 97- 99 % reusing of existing code. The performance and
functional strength of HTML5 or JavaScript incorporate native platforms for the mobile that
consume less energy of the devices.
Conclusion
From the above research question, it has concluded that the related work has provided
some information about the cross-platform mobile app development challenges. The analysis
done about the cross-platform challenges has given the strategies through which it can avoid the
challenge that the developers face. With the individual research that has carried out in this paper
has revealed that the emerging technology of React Native by Facebook provides hybrid tools
through which a cross-platform application would develop and will be used in both iOS and
Android. Therefore, it has suggested that the user must know about the advantage and
disadvantage of using a cross-platform mobile app.

5CHALLENGES IN CROSS PLATFORM MOBILE APP DEVELOPMENT
References
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6CHALLENGES IN CROSS PLATFORM MOBILE APP DEVELOPMENT
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