Industrial Practitioner Perspective of Mobile Applications Programming Languages and Systems

The growth of mobile application development industry made it crucial for researchers to study the industry practices of choosing mobile applications programming languages, systems, and tools. With the increased attention of cross-platform mobile applications development from both researchers and industry, this paper aims at answering the question of whether most of the industries are using cross -platform development or native development. The paper collects feedback about industry's most used mobile development systems. In addition, it provides a map of the different technologies used by mobile applications development companies according to some of the demographics like company size and location. An online questionnaire is carried out to collect the data. The survey targeted both amateur and professional mobile developers. A total of 85 participants participated in answering the survey. Qualitative analysis using descriptive statistics is done on the results of the survey. Although the results show that there is an industrial trend towards using the cross-platform languages, native development is still used by the well-established companies. More than 50% of the participants are found to be aware of the performance issues of the cross-platform development languages and frameworks. Comparison with findings of related work is discussed which raises more research questions and draws out future research in this field.