Issues and Challenges of Mobile Web Applications: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

The popularity of mobile handheld devices has led to a large variety of mobile applications being designed and developed for mobile operating system providers, such as Apple, Google, Blackberry and Microsoft. There are several types of mobile applications such as native, hybrid and web. Mobile web apps tend to solve several problems in native apps such as expensive multi-platform development and fragmentation. While these advantages were backed by some Google executives, a study conducted by ComScore - a leading American media measurement and analytics company, however, shows that user engagement on mobile web apps is significantly lower than that of the native apps. Thus, this paper aims to explore and discuss the underlying issues and challenges of progressive web applications or mobile web apps. This paper uses the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) method in undertaking a systematic literature review. Several issues were identified and heterogeneity of mobile devices and limited access to low level features are the most common issues that were discussed. In addition, there were nine (9) other issues that have been discovered.