Challenges in Developing Desktop Web Apps: a Study of Stack Overflow and GitHub

Software companies have an interest in reaching the maximum amount of potential customers while, at the same time, providing a frictionless experience. Desktop web app frameworks are promising in this respect, allowing developers and companies to reuse existing code and knowledge of web applications to create cross-platform apps integrated with native APIs. Despite their growing popularity, existing challenges in employing these technologies have not been documented, and it is hard for individuals and companies to weigh benefits and pros against drawbacks and cons.In this paper, we address this issue by investigating the challenges that developers frequently experience when adopting desktop web app frameworks. To achieve this goal, we mine and apply topic modeling techniques to a dataset of 10,822 Stack Overflow posts related to the development of desktop web applications. Analyzing the resulting topics, we found that: i) developers often experience issues regarding the build and deployment processes for multiple platforms; ii) reusing existing libraries and development tools in the context of desktop applications is often cumbersome; iii) it is hard to solve issues that arise when interacting with native APIs. Furthermore, we confirm our finding by providing evidence that the identified issues are also present in the issue reports of 453 open-source applications publicly hosted on GitHub.