Cross-platform development for Sailfish OS and Android: Architectural patterns and “dictionary trainer” application case study

Abstract

With the widespread use of mobile devices, the role of mobile applications increases. Nevertheless, the variety of mobile platforms and the differences between them make the development of applications for multiple mobile platforms a highly resource-intensive and time-consuming task. The reason for this is the need for development of separate native applications for each platform. This issue can be overcome by developing cross-platform applications that, once created, can be launched on multiple platforms without any changes in source codes. In this paper, we present an approach for developing native cross-platform mobile applications for Android and Sailfish OS platforms, with the use of Qt Framework and Qt Quick based on the Flux architecture. Such applications have a native look and experience on each platform. The paper also presents the “Dictionary Trainer” application, that was developed using the described approach.

Keywords

• cross-platform development
• mobile application
• Android
• SailfishOS
• Qt