Developing Cross-platform Mobile and Web Apps

Abstract

The rapid growth of mobile usage in the world has created many opportunities to leverage the ubiquity of mobile network. Mobile applications have gained momentum in many sectors including agriculture. However, development of mobile apps is still facing many challenges, including platform fragmentation and rapid changes of the mobile technology. It hence has a great benefit to identify common frameworks and solutions that allow developers to leverage a single codebase and deploy it on multiple platforms, both on different mobile devices and mobile web. This paper explores current mobile technologies and design options of mobile databases to develop cross-platform mobile apps. Discussions are made using the proposed framework for a mobile project named Southeast Landscape Pests developed at University of Florida/IFAS. The project leverages cross-platform technologies and JSON as an alternative for database storage. The solution is a cost effective approach to deploy apps to iOS, Android and Web and could be adopted for other small size mobile projects.