Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Coding Overhead Of Mobile Apps, Yoonsik Cheon

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

A mobile app runs on small devices such as smartphones and tablets. Perhaps, because of this, there is a common misconception that writing a mobile app is simpler than a desktop application. In this paper, we show that this is indeed a misconception, and it's the other way around. We perform a small experiment to measure the source code sizes of a desktop application and an equivalent mobile app written in the same language. We found that the mobile version is 19% bigger than the desktop version in terms of the source lines of code, and the mobile code is …