Android App Development & Maps - Native vs Cross-platform (2013)
Photo by MapBox.com
Company: Inovans (now We+)
Years: 2012 - 2013
Location: Toulouse, France
For my master’s project, our school tasked us to find a company and do a project for them. A classmate and I approached a consulting firm in operational optimization called Inovans (later bought by We+) to help them have a better understanding of Android mobile applications that used a maps component.
The project consisted of developing two Android applications, a native one in Java with the Google Maps API and a cross-platform one with the PhoneGap framework (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) and the MapQuest API.
A comprehensive study was done first around native vs cross-platform but also around all of the mobile maps solutions that existed at that time. Then, the two applications were developed along with additional tools to analyze and compare the data we collected against specific scenarios.
The conclusion of the study wasn’t a surprise as we already knew that cross-platform frameworks had performance issues but the two applications gave us a lot of data and served as a proof of concept for the company development needs.
- Project size: 2 persons
- Project length: 5 months
- Android SDK / Oracle Eclipse / Google Maps / MapQuest
