Native or Web? A Preliminary Study on the Energy Consumption of Android Development Models

Energy consumption has become an increasingly important topic in software development, especially due to the ubiquity of mobile devices, and the choice of programming language can directly impact battery life. This paper presents a study on the issue of energy efficiency on the Android platform, comparing the performance and energy consumption of 33 different benchmarks in the two main programming languages employed in Android development: Java and JavaScript. Preliminary results show that Java applications may consume up to 36.27x more energy, with a median of 2.28x, than their JavaScript counterparts, in benchmarks that are mostly CPU-intensive. In some scenarios, though, Java benchmarks exhibited better energy efficiency, with JavaScript consuming up to 2.27x more energy. Based on these results, two Java applications were re-engineered, and through the insertion of JavaScript functions, hybrid applications were produced. In both cases, improvements in energy efficiency were obtained. Considering that Android apps written in Java are the norm, results from this study indicate that using a combination of JavaScript and Java may lead to a non-negligible improvement in energy efficiency.