Cross-platform mobile development approaches

The diversity of platforms on the smart phones market, make the mobile applications development quite difficult and very expensive. Platform development could be a good solution for this problem. We´ll start by defining cross-platform development, and define the different types of mobile applications, and then define and explain the different approaches used in cross-platform development in order to achieve a comparison between these approaches allowing us to identify the strong points, and weaknesses of each approach. We present our results in a comparative table taking into consideration several criteria. These benchmarks have shown that the choice of a cross-platform development approach depends mainly on two things: to know what type of mobile application should be directed, and or targeted platforms. And adding the fact that multiplatform tools based on these approaches are limited in some point (access to different API platforms, performance compared to native applications ...), this work shows with certainty that more research is needed to go further than the current approaches.