Cross-Platform Solution for Mobile Application Development

Abstract: With the possibility to increase the smart phone market, the mobileapplication development is experiencing a rapid improvement in termsof both revenue and innovation. Considering the demand in the applicationdevelopment market, there is an urge to develop applications fasterand smoother with the growing number of different platforms andtechnologies. Many companies and brands are making their marketingstrategies more efficient by using mobile applications. The constant growth in mobile devices and operating systems raiseseveral problems and challenges in mobile application development.With this growth, a developer finds it difficult to build applicationskeeping the native technologies in mind with respect to the deviceplatform. Application development for a mobile device mainly dealswith native development platforms such as C, Objective-C, Java, C#,J2ME, C++ etc., and is incompatible with the cross-platform support.HTML5 is a solution that incorporates cross-platform capability in allthese devices. The purpose of this thesis is to research the different approaches ofmobile application development and to find a favourable environmentfor a cross mobile platform development. The smart phone applicationdevelopment can built in three environments and the applications candiffer such as native applications, cross-platform applications and hybridapplications. The research work includes the study of several cross-platform frameworks,responsive web designing and location-based web services. Theobjective of this thesis is to develop a full-fledged application of classifiedservices which also includes location-based services keeping inmind the new web technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, jQuery etc., andto use the frameworks by investigating and choosing different tools andAPIs that incorporate the development of cross-platform applications.The work also includes the development of the look and feel prototypemodels for the classified ad mobile applications in terms of native applicationand hybrid application respectively for Android mobile phones.The developed cross-platform application is then compared with thetwo look and feel prototypes and the results are presented accordingly.The results can give us a better idea of the choice of environment for application development based on the user requirements such as ease ofdevelopment and cost constraints.