Does the Migration of Cross-Platform Apps Towards the Android Platform Matter? An Approach and a User Study

We present an approach to migrate cross-platform apps toward a native platform (i.e., Android). The approach is tailored to Ionic, i.e., an open-source framework providing a mobile UI (User Interface) toolkit for developing high-quality cross-platform apps. The validity of our approach has been validated on an open-source app developed by means of Ionic (i.e., Movies-app). In such a way, we had two versions of the same app: one developed in Ionic (the original one) and the other in Android (the migrated one). To investigate if there is a difference in the user experience when using these two versions, we conducted a user study. This user study also aimed at assessing the presence of possible differences in the affective reactions of users when using these two versions of Movies-app. The results suggest that the user experience is better when users deal with the migrated app. Similar results were achieved with respect to the affective reactions of users. We can then conclude that the migration from Ionic towards Android matters.