Paper #1

Trans-Compiler-Based Conversion from Cross-Platform Applications to Native Applications

Amira T. Mahmoud, Moataz-bellah Radwan, Abdelrahman Mohamed Soliman, Ahmed H. Youssef, Hala H. Zayed and Walaa Medhat

Abstract: Cross-platform mobile application development is emerging widely in the mobile applications industry. Cross-platform Frameworks (CPFs) like React Native, Flutter, and Xamarin are used by many developing companies. The technology these frameworks use faces performance and resource use efficiency limitations compared to native applications. The native applications are written in the native languages of the platforms. Trans-complier-based conversion between native languages of different platforms of mobile applications has been addressed in recent research. However, the problem statement needed to be mathematically represented. The solution depended on hard coding and needed more generalization. In addition, it might not be a practical solution for companies that are using and already have built applications using CPFs. Therefore, in this paper, we present an enhanced-trans-compiler-based converter to convert applications made by CPFs to native applications. We implemented the architecture to convert React Native and Xamarin applications. The React Native to Native tool converted thirteen applications to native Android and iOS applications, with accuracies ranging from 40% for large applications to 100% for simple applications. The maximum conversion time was seven minutes for converting 40% of an 8K LOC application. In addition, since Large Language Models (LLMs) are the trendiest technology in our era, we compared our proposed solution output with LLMs. We concluded its superiority compared to the status of LLMs. Performance evaluation is also done to compare the React Native applications against native applications generated by the trans-compiler tool. The assessment showed that the native applications perform better than React Native regarding runtime memory consumption, storage, and speed. The Xamarin to Native tool was also tested to show the genericness of the architecture and how it can be extended to convert from any CPF to Native applications.

Keywords: Code generation; Cross-platform; Mobile applications; Innovation; Resource use efficiency; Trans-compilation.