An Evaluation Framework for Cross-Platform Mobile Application Development Tools

The mobile application market is becoming increasingly fragmented with the availability of multiple mobile platforms that differ in development procedures. Developers are forced to choose to support only some platforms and specific devices due to limited development resources. To address these challenges, numerous tools have been created to aid developers in building cross-platform applications, however, there is no metric to evaluate the quality of these tools. This thesis introduces a framework for evaluating the features, performance and discuss development experience of existing and future cross-platform development tools. The framework is implemented by benchmarking several tools and the results identify a disparity in the features and performance. This research is carried out in collaboration with industrial partner Desire2Learn, through an NSERC Engage Grant.