Comparison of popular cross-platform mobile application development tools

Proliferation of the Internet and mobile devices like smart phones and tablets has dramatically changed the way people do business, access information, communicate with each other, and have leisure time on the go. Mobile application have become more important than ever in daily life in this regard. It has therefore become a challenge for software vendors to create mobile applications that can run on many common mobile operating systems like iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. One approach to this problem is to have separate code bases and separate development teams for each platform for the same application, which is obviously a costly solution. Therefore, applications vendors continuously seek better long-term alternatives. In order to reduce development effort and cost while providing rapid delivery to all application markets at once, a preferred alternative is to use a cross-platform mobile application development tool/framework. In this paper, we present an elaborate comparison of several popular cross-platform mobile application development tools, namely, PhoneGap/Cordova, Xamarin, Appcelerator Titanium, and Smartface App Studio. We provide a pragmatic comparison from different perspectives like ease and cost of development including programming language and tool support, end-product capability and performance, security, and community support. This comparison aims to support mobile application vendors from a large scale, from freelancers to enterprise development teams, when making a choice with respect to their specific requirements and constraints.