The market for mobile apps is divided into two major competing platforms for mobile devices (such as smartphones and tablets): Google's Android and Apple's iOS. App providers have to decide whether to either limit the target market to one of the major market segments only or to reach the customers of both market segments by substantially extending the development efforts. In this domain, market diversity is of central importance, because market shares show high volatility.

The goal of the AppTrans project is to provide a high-quality translator between source code projects for iOS and Android. Such a translator will automatically translate the major part of the source code of Apps in order to minimise the overhead to reach both market segments. This will increase the market potential for App developers and reduce costs and risks.

The project is based on previous experience in automated translation between industrial-size code bases for satellite ground control. The formally founded and tool-supported triple graph grammar approach proved to result in tremendous time savings and high reliability for the industrial partner SES. Even the translation of complex code structures can be specified visually and this rule-based specification is directly executed.

Project duration: 01.05.2014 - 31.10.2014.