research-article

Extracting Mapping Relations for Mobile User Interface Transformation

Authors:

Tian ZhangAuthors Info & Claims

Internetware '19: Proceedings of the 11th Asia-Pacific Symposium on Internetware

Article No.: 2, Pages 1 - 10

https://doi.org/10.1145/3361242.3361250

Published: 28 October 2019 Publication History

Abstract

The development of mobile apps has become the current mantra for any business' success. The rise of many types of mobile devices and mobile OS has instantly created the need to develop multiple versions for the same app. In order to grasp as much market share as possible, it is desirable to have all the versions of an app demonstrate similar user interface (UI) appearances, to make users feel comfortable when switching from one platform to another and more likely to stick to the app. However, to ensure consistent UIs among cross-platform versions can be a challenging and costly endeavor, since different platforms have their own UI controls and programming languages. In this paper, we propose an automatic approach to transforming mobile app UIs across platforms, and illustrate our approach by transforming the UIs of iOS apps to Android ones. We leverage the enormous existing apps carefully designed by developers to achieve similar UI effects between iOS and Android versions, since these apps contain valuable knowledge of mapping relations between the iOS and Android UI controls. Starting from the reverse engineering of these apps, our approach separates each user interface into modules of adequate sizes. Then it maps the modules from both versions that contribute to the same visual and functional effect, and automatically mines the mapping relations. By applying the mined relations, our approach has successfully transformed the iOS app UIs into Android app UIs, as confirmed by a series of experiments.

References

[1]

Xamarin, "Xamarin," Aug. 2017. [Online]. Available: https://developers.xamarin.com/

[2]

Google, "J2objc," Aug. 2017. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/google/j2objc

[3]

Adobe, "Adobe phonegap," Aug. 2017. [Online]. Available: https://phonegap.com/

[4]

Apache, "Apache cordova," Aug. 2017. [Online]. Available: http://cordova.apache.org/

[5]

Sencha, "Sencha," Aug. 2017. [Online]. Available: https://www.sencha. com/

[6]

Myappconverter, "Myappconverter," Aug. 2017. [Online]. Available: https://apps.myappconverter.com/

[7]

MyappconverterWeb, "Myappconverterdocument," Aug. 2017. [Online]. Available: https://docs.myappconverter.com/

[8]

Appium, "Appium," Aug. 2017. [Online]. Available: http://appium.io/slate/en/master/

[9]

Android, "Android developer," Aug. 2017. [Online]. Available: https://developer.android.com/reference/classes.html

[10]

iOS, "ios developer," Aug. 2017. [Online]. Available: https://developer.apple.com/ios/human-interface-guidelines/ui-controls/buttons/

[11]

Coding, "Coding," Aug. 2017. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/Coding/Coding-iOS

[12]

Wocall, "Wocall," Aug. 2017. [Online]. Available: https://gitbug.com/Quotation/Whocall

[13]

PlainReader, "Plainreader," Aug. 2017. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/guojiubo/PlainReader

[14]

DouBan, "Douban," Aug. 2017. [Online]. Available: https://gutbuh.com/TonnyTao/DoubanAlbum

[15]

zulip, "zulip," Aug. 2017. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/zulip/zulipios-legacy

[16]

Doppio, "Doppio," Aug. 2017. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/chroman/Doppio

[17]

News-YC, "News-yc," Aug. 2017. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/grp/newsyc

[18]

WNXHuntForCity, "Wnxhuntforcity," Aug. 2017. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/ZhongTaoTian/WNXHuntForCity

[19]

M. Palmieri, I. Singh, and A. Cicchetti, "Comparison of cross-platform mobile development tools," 2012 16th International Conference on Intelligence in Next Generation Networks, pp. 179--186, 2012.

[20]

A. Holzinger, P. Treitler, and W. Slany, "Making apps useable on multiple different mobile platforms: On interoperability for business application development on smartphones," International Conference on Availability, Reliability, and Security, pp. 176--189, 2012.

[21]

S. Xanthopoulos and S. Xinogalos, "A comparative analysis of cross-platform development approaches for mobile applications," Proceedings of the 6th Balkan Conference in Informatics, pp. 213--220, 2013.

Digital Library

[22]

V. Tunali and S. Zafer, "Comparison of popular cross-platform mobile application development tools," Celal Bayar University: Faculty of Technology Department of Software Engineering, Maltepe University: Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences Department of Software Engineering, 2015.

[23]

J. Friberg, "Evaluation of cross-platform development for mobile devices," 2014.

[24]

N. Boushehrinejadmoradi, V. Ganapathy, S. Nagarakatte, and L. Iftode, "Testing cross-platform mobile app development frameworks (t)," 2015 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), pp. 441--451, 2015.

[25]

S. Barnett, R. Vasa, and J. Grundy, "Bootstrapping mobile app development," Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering-Volume 2, pp. 657--660, 2015.

[26]

M. Brambilla, J. Cabot, and M. Wimmer, "Model-driven software engineering in practice," Synthesis Lectures on Software Engineering, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 1--207, 2017.

[27]

T.-D. Nguyen and J. Vanderdonckt, "User interface master detail pattern on android," Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGCHI symposium on Engineering interactive computing systems, pp. 299--304, 2012.

Digital Library

[28]

A. Ribeiro and A. R. da Silva, "Evaluation of xis-mobile, a domain specific language for mobile application development," Journal of Software Engineering and Applications, vol. 7, no. 11, p. 906, 2014.

[29]

H. Heitkötter, T. A. Majchrzak, and H. Kuchen, "Cross-platform model- driven development of mobile applications with md 2," Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, pp. 526--533, 2013.

Digital Library

[30]

M. E. Joorabchi, M. Ali, and A. Mesbah, "Detecting inconsistencies in multi-platform mobile apps," 2015 IEEE 26th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE), pp. 450--460, 2015.

[31]

W. S. El-Kassas, B. A. Abdullah, A. H. Yousef, and A. M. Wahba, "Enhanced code conversion approach for the integrated cross-platform mobile development (icpmd)," IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 42, no. 11, pp. 1036--1053, 2016.

Digital Library

[32]

A. Gokhale, V. Ganapathy, and Y. Padmanaban, "Inferring likely mappings between apis," Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering, pp. 82--91, 2013.

[33]

M. P. Robillard, E. Bodden, D. Kawrykow, M. Mezini, and T. Ratchford, "Automated api property inference techniques," IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 39, no. 5, pp. 613--637, 2013.

Digital Library

[34]

H. Zhong, S. Thummalapenta, T. Xie, L. Zhang, and Q. Wang, "Mining api mapping for language migration," Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering-Volume 1, pp. 195--204, 2010.

Digital Library

[35]

R. Nix and J. Zhang, "Classification of android apps and malware using deep neural networks," 2017 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), pp. 1871--1878, 2017.

[36]

X. Gu, H. Zhang, D. Zhang, and S. Kim, "Deep api learning," Proceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, pp. 631--642, 2016.

[37]

V. Srivastava, M. D. Bond, K. S. McKinley, and V. Shmatikov, "A security policy oracle: Detecting security holes using multiple api implementations," ACM SIGPLAN Notices, vol. 46, no. 6, pp. 343--354, 2011.

Digital Library

[38]

S. Wang, T. Liu, and L. Tan, "Automatically learning semantic features for defect prediction," 2016 IEEE/ACM 38th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), pp. 297--308, 2016.

[39]

E. Wong, T. Liu, and L. Tan, "Clocom: Mining existing source code for automatic comment generation," 2015 IEEE 22nd International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER), pp. 380--389, 2015.

[40]

R. Holmes, R. Cottrell, R. J. Walker, and J. Denzinger, "The end-to-end use of source code examples: An exploratory study," 2009 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, pp. 555--558, 2009.

[41]

F. Lv, H. Zhang, J.-g. Lou, S. Wang, D. Zhang, and J. Zhao, "Codehow: Effective code search based on api understanding and extended boolean model (e)," 2015 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), pp. 260--270, 2015.

[42]

C. McMillan, M. Grechanik, D. Poshyvanyk, Q. Xie, and C. Fu, "Portfolio: finding relevant functions and their usage," Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering, pp. 111-- 120, 2011.

Digital Library

Cited By

Mahmoud ARadwan MSoliman AYousef AZayed HMedhat W(2024)Trans-Compiler-Based Conversion from Cross-Platform Applications to Native ApplicationsAnnals of Emerging Technologies in Computing10.33166/AETiC.2024.04.0018:4(1-29)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.33166/AETiC.2024.04.001
El-Kaliouby SYousef ASelim S(2023)Mobile Application Code Generation Approaches: A SurveyAdvances in Model and Data Engineering in the Digitalization Era10.1007/978-3-031-23119-3_10(136-148)Online publication date: 10-Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23119-3_10
Muhammad ASoliman AZayed HYousef ASelim S(2023)Automated library mapping approach based on cross‐platform for mobile development programming languagesSoftware: Practice and Experience10.1002/spe.328154:5(683-703)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.3281

Recommendations

Impacto da adoção do phonegap na interface de aplicações móveis
IHC '13: Proceedings of the 12th Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Nowadays, there are distinct platforms for mobile applications (apps): Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Blackberry, and others. In fact, the most popular mobile apps, such as Facebook and Gmail, are available for multiple platforms. Developing and ...
An Evaluation Framework for Cross-Platform Mobile App Development Tools: A case analysis of Adobe PhoneGap framework
CompSysTech '16: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computer Systems and Technologies 2016

The 'App economy' is a highly lucrative and competitive market for independent software vendors as it potentially offers an easy highway to reach millions of users. However, the mobile application landscape is scattered and an application developer has ...
Developing mobile apps using cross-platform frameworks: a case study
HCI'13: Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Human-Computer Interaction: human-centred design approaches, methods, tools, and environments - Volume Part I

In last few years, a huge variety of frameworks for the mobile cross-platform development have been released to deliver quick and overall better solutions. Most of them are based on different approaches and technologies; therefore, relying on only one ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

Internetware '19: Proceedings of the 11th Asia-Pacific Symposium on Internetware

October 2019

179 pages

ISBN:9781450377010

DOI:10.1145/3361242

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

In-Cooperation

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 28 October 2019

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed limited

Funding Sources

the National Natural Science Foundation of China
the Jiangsu key R & D Plan of China
the National Key R & D Program of China

Conference

Internetware '19

Internetware '19: The 11th Asia-Pacific Symposium on Internetware

October 28 - 29, 2019

Fukuoka, Japan

Acceptance Rates

Internetware '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 20 of 35 submissions, 57%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 55 of 111 submissions, 50%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

3
Total Citations
View Citations
124
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)8
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1

Reflects downloads up to 08 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Mahmoud ARadwan MSoliman AYousef AZayed HMedhat W(2024)Trans-Compiler-Based Conversion from Cross-Platform Applications to Native ApplicationsAnnals of Emerging Technologies in Computing10.33166/AETiC.2024.04.0018:4(1-29)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.33166/AETiC.2024.04.001
El-Kaliouby SYousef ASelim S(2023)Mobile Application Code Generation Approaches: A SurveyAdvances in Model and Data Engineering in the Digitalization Era10.1007/978-3-031-23119-3_10(136-148)Online publication date: 10-Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23119-3_10
Muhammad ASoliman AZayed HYousef ASelim S(2023)Automated library mapping approach based on cross‐platform for mobile development programming languagesSoftware: Practice and Experience10.1002/spe.328154:5(683-703)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.3281

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten