2. Related Works
The available technological options for developing multi-platform mobile applications are web-based apps and
hybrid apps. Hybrid apps, though also relying on standardized web technologies, are bundled within a native app
“container”, which serves as a bridge to access device hardware and functions like ringing, vibrating, notifications,
making calls, using the camera, GPS sensor and accelerometer10. There are several hybrid multi-platform mobile
application that have been developed such as PhoneGap, Titanium, and Xamarin11. These frameworks let a
developer use one programming language to build a mobile application that support multiple different platforms at
once. There is also some web framework such as jQueryMobile and Sencha Touch that enables a web developer to
create a mobile website with a similar design as mobile platform’s native interface12.
In the context of user interface, each major mobile platform has their own design pattern. While Android prefer
tabbed layout to have their tabs on the upper side of the layout13, iOS prefer to have the tabs on the bottom side of
the layout14. With this kind of difference, existing multi-platform framework could not decrease the effort of
devising appropriate user interfaces for the different device types and orientations, however it still helped to create a
codebase which is usable across multiple platforms15. Even if only a single platform is to be supported, a crossplatform
approach may prove as the most efficient method due to its low barriers mainly owed to usage of
standardized and popular Web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript6
.
From the performance perspective, a hybrid mobile application using framework such as Phonegap had been
known to be fast and giving smooth user interaction comparable with a native application. In comparison, website
applications give slower performance due to the fact that a Web app has to be loaded via the Internet. This
phenomenon can be limited by keeping an offline copy of the page. At runtime, Web apps profit from the fact that
today’s smartphone browsers are highly performance-optimized7
.