Dealing with Comprehension and Bugs in Native and Cross-Platform Apps: A Controlled Experiment

In this paper, we present the results of a controlled experiment aimed to investigate whether there is a difference when comprehending apps implemented with either cross-platform (Ionic-Cordova-Angular) and native (Android) technologies. We divided participants into two groups. The participants in each group were asked to comprehend the source code of either the app implemented using Ionic-Cordova-Angular technology or its Android version. We also asked the participants to identify and fix faults in the source code. The goal was to verify if the technology might play a role in the execution of these two kinds of tasks. We also investigated the affective reactions of participants and the difficulty they perceived when accomplishing the tasks mentioned before. The most important take-away result is: there is not a statistically significant difference in the comprehension and in the identification and fixing of bugs when dealing with either native or cross-platform apps.