Building a Cross-Platform Bridging Library for Native Mobile SDKs

Abstract

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.