Do Mobile Developers Ask on Q&A Sites About Error Codes Thrown by a Cross-Platform App Development Framework? An Empirical Study.

During last years development frameworks have emerged to make easier the development and maintenance of cross-platform mobile applications. Xamarin framework is one of them: it takes as input an app written in C# and produces native code for Android, iOS and Windows Mobile platforms. When using Xamarin, developers can meet errors, identified with codes, thrown by the framework.Unfortunately, the Xamarin official documentation does not provide a complete description, solution or workaround for all those codes.In this paper, we analyze two sites of questions and answers related to Xamarin for finding questions that mention those error codes. We found in both sites that there are questions written by developers asking about Xamarin errors, and the majority of them have at least one answer. Our intuition is this discovered information could be useful for giving support to Xamarin developers.