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An Analysis of Mobile Application Update Strategies via Cordova

Authors:
Cristiano Inacio Lemes
Michiel Willocx
Vincent Naessens
Marco Vieira

Keywords: Cross-Platform Tools; Security.

Abstract:
The demand for mobile apps is increasing steadily. To maximize revenue in Business to Customer (B2C) settings, multiple platforms and devices must be supported, which leads to increased development cost. Mobile App Cross Platform Tools (CPTs) tackle this problem as they allow to deploy and run a single codebase on multiple platforms. Cordova is a popular framework for cross-platform development. Multiple plugins support often recurring concerns. One prototypical example is update plugins. This paper focuses on the assessment of update plugins in Cordova, supporting the distribution of code updates. The paper evaluates the most commonly employed ones and compares them against traditional version updates with respect to security and relevant quality parameters. We show that improvident plugin selection and bad developer practices may seriously undermine the security and quality of the mobile apps.

Pages: 33 to 40

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2017

Publication date: June 25, 2017

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-3468

ISBN: 978-1-61208-568-5

Location: Venice, Italy

Dates: from June 25, 2017 to June 29, 2017