Research On UI Transformation From IOS To Android Based On Rules Extraction And Guidance

The development of mobile apps has become the current mantra for any business'success.The rise of many types of mobile devices and mobile OS has instantly cre-ated the need to develop multiple versions for the same app.In order to make users feel comfortable when switching from one platform to another and more likely to stick to the app,it is desirable to have all the versions of an app demonstrate similar user interface(UI)appearances.However,to ensure the mobile app transformation has to meet the needs of artistic appearance and smooth usage from the customeres can be a challenging and costly endeavor,since different platforms have their own UI controls and programming languages.In this paper,we propose an automatic approach to transforming mobile app Uls across platforms,and illustrate our approach by transforming the UIs of iOS apps to Android ones.Enormous existing apps carefully designed by developers achieve simi-lar UI effects between iOS and Android versions,these usages of controls and attributes can be the contain valuable knowledge of mapping relations between the iOS and An-droid UI controls,which can be collected for transformation for UI part.Starting from the reverse engineering of these apps,our approach separates each user interface into modules of adequate sizes.Then it maps the modules from both versions that contribute to the same visual and functional effect,and automatically mines the mapping relations.The transformation is matching the new pages within these modules and picking up the suitable attributes for controls.The main work of this paper is as follows:1.Propose a method for obtaining the rules of UI controls and attributes usage from the similar interface Android and iOS applications.These correspondence rules include a set of controls,attributes with the information about the layout and struc-ture between the controls.This method can automatically obtain the rules from the existing multiple versions of the same application and store them in the database.2.Based on the rules obtained above,an automatic conversion method of iOS to An-droid application UI code is proposed.Match the target iOS application in the rule database,and convert the control trees,the attributes and other resource files ac-cording to the matched rules which will lead to the executable Android UI code.3.Based on the above method,the prototype tool of cross-platform transformation is realized and experimental research is carried out.We conducted a module mapping database form 18 realize apps,and further successfully transform 8 open source Storyboard/xib programs.We evaluate these cases' appearance and function effects with many aspects:validity,accuracy,the most suitable depth of modules,and the comparison with other tools.