The Impact of Cross-platform Development Approaches for Mobile Applications from the User's Perspective

Mobile app developers today have a hard decision to make: to independently develop native apps for different operating systems or to develop an app that is cross-platform compatible. The availability of different tools and approaches to support cross-platform app development only makes the decision harder. In this study, we used user reviews of apps to empirically understand the relationship (if any) between the approach used in the development of an app and its perceived quality. We used Natural Language Processing (NLP) models to classify 787,228 user reviews of the Android version and iOS version of 50 apps as complaints in one of four quality concerns: performance, usability, security, and reliability. We found that hybrid apps (on both Android and iOS platforms) tend to be more prone to user complaints than interpreted/generated apps. In a study of Facebook, an app that underwent a change in development approach from hybrid to native, we found that change in the development approach was accompanied by a reduction in user complaints about performance and reliability.