An Empirical Study of Investigating Mobile Applications Development Challenges

Context: mobile application development is rapidly evolving with substantial economic and scientific interest. One of the primary reasons for mobile application development failure is the increasing number of mobile platforms; some organizations endorse mobile application development before understanding the associated development challenges of each target platform. Objective: the objective of this paper is to identify the challenges of native, web, and hybrid mobile applications, which can undermine the successful development of such applications. Method: we adopted a two-phase research approach: at first, the challenges were identified via a systematic literature review (SLR); and then, the identified challenges were validated through conducting interviews with practitioners. Results: through both research approaches, we identified nine challenges vital to the success of mobile application development and four additional challenges from interviews not reported in the literature. A comparison of the challenges (native, web, and hybrid) identified in SLR indicates that there are slightly more differences than similarities between the challenges. On the other hand, the challenges (native, web, and hybrid) identified in interviews indicates that there are more similarities than differences between the challenges. Our results show a weak negative correlation between the ranks obtained from the SLR and the interviews ([rs(9) = -.034], p = 0.932). The results obtained from our t-test (i.e., t = 0.868, p = 0.402 > 0.05) depicts that there is no significant difference between the findings of SLR and interviews. Conclusions: mobile application development organizations should try to address the identified challenges when developing mobile applications (native, web, or hybrid) to increase the probability of mobile application success.