Building a Cross-Platform Bridging Library for Native Mobile SDKs

Mobile application development frequently requires usage of third-party software development toolkits (SDKs), which usually come in two variants, Android and iOS. This necessitates two separate workflows and expertise to create the application on both platforms, rendering the native development process both time-intensive and costly. Although the emergence of cross-platform frameworks like React Native attempts to streamline the process by allowing developers to share code on multiple operating systems via a single code base, many SDKs provide no React Native integration — a bridge must be built out of the native versions. In this thesis, we present a React Native bridging library for Cambridge Mobile Telematics’ Android and iOS SDKs. We explore and evaluate abstraction and implementation strategies for mitigating differences between the two SDKs and platforms. Accompanying the library is the React Native Sample App, which demonstrates the library in action. We then evaluate the React Native Sample App by comparing first its line count and secondly its performance against native versions of sample applications previously built by CMT. Finally, we suggest possible software design choices that can facilitate cross-platform development. Our results suggest that a bridging library, on a cross-platform framework, is promising in improving code portability and thus reducing development effort in building mobile applications.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Li, Yanlin

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Madden, Samuel
• Wang, Alexander

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright MIT

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/144910

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/144910