Mobile Application Code Generation Approaches: A Survey

With the extensive usage of mobile applications in daily life, it has become crucial for the companies of software to develop applications for the most popular platforms such as Android and iOS in the shortest possible time and at the lowest possible cost. However, ensuring consistent UIs and functionalities among cross-platform versions can be challenging and costly since different platforms have their own UI controls and programming languages. Also, when cross-platform tools are used, it is always time consuming to learn a new language. Many solutions were proposed to achieve the native performance. In this paper, two categories are surveyed: Code generation and code mapping which is also known as code-to-code conversion. The code generation approach is concerned with generating user interfaces for applications utilizing deep learning and image processing techniques. Meanwhile, the code-to-code mapping method maps native code to the appropriate platform. In addition, proposals for further investigations are made. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.