Improved Cross-Platform Mobile Applications to Native Applications Converters

In recent times, many software development firms have opted for cross-platform mobile application development methods over solely native approaches due to various advantages, such as rapid development, cost-effectiveness, and the consolidation of business logic within a single codebase. Some research has explored different cross-platform strategies, including compiler-based code conversion and a few efforts have also been directed towards enhancing user interface (UI) conversion processes. However, existing converters often focus on translating platform-independent code and a few mainly focused on the past UI frameworks and libraries of their respective mobile platforms, not harnessing the efficiency, simplicity, modernity and similarity of the modern declarative UI frameworks. In this paper, we introduce an enhanced native mobile application UI and business logic code converter based on trans-compilation. Our approach translates iOS Swift UI to Android Jetpack Compose, significantly increasing code translation percentages compared to previous methods. Our experiments showed an increase in translated codebase percentage from 28.8% to 90.6% evaluated using the BLEU method across five applications.