Migrating User Interfaces in Native Mobile Applications: Android to iOS

Abstract

Mobile application migration is the process of porting an application's source code from one mobile platform to another. This process is difficult due to many differences between the platforms, such as languages, libraries, tools, design principles, and special hardware features. We consider migrating native mobile applications, which are not typically designed to be portable. While language translators exist to convert some of the source code, there is a lack of techniques to migrate the user interface. In this paper, we propose a technique to semi-automatically migrate the user interface of a native mobile application from Android to iOS.