OTT Video-Oriented Mobile Applications Development Using Cross-Platform UI Frameworks

Abstract: Google and Apple together are ruling the mobile phone industry with their operating systems, Android and iOS. Any mobile application willing to reach the vast majority of end-users, need to be run on both platforms. The issue, however, arises when considering that fact that developing an application for each platform requires different knowledge and code base. Cross-platform frameworks are emerged to overcome the mentioned issue by providing the possibility to develop a mobile application which works on multiple platforms with potentially a single code base.To investigate the capabilities of cross-platform frameworks, three frameworks were chosen to be compared; React Native backed by Facebook, Xamarin owned by Microsoft, and Flutter developed by Google. The chosen frameworks have been compared in the context of OTT Videooriented mobile applications. As a reference application OTT Flow, an OTT Video application developed by Accedo, has been used.The findings in this thesis shows that Xamarin is not a good choice for the purpose of this thesis since no advantages were witnessed in most of the criteria. React Native and Flutter, on the other hand, offer promising features which suit developing OTT applications. When considering the video-specific functionalities, however, React Native stood out slightly better. In fact, even though React Native is possibly the best choice among the mentioned frameworks for developing OTT Video-oriented mobile applications, the cross-platform frameworks are not mature enough in terms of video-specific functionalities support yet.