Mobile development in Swift, Java and React Native: an experimental evaluation in audioguides

Mobile development is increasingly integrated into software development companies. Customers are currently expecting applications with good performance in less time and at lower cost. The demand for a hybrid solution which allows the development of applications for both platforms with the same code is no longer new. React Native is a recent framework that has emerged to bridge the gaps presented by previous solutions, combining JavaScript development, which is now considered the best solution for frontend development. In this article, a comparative analysis of the development time of the main functionalities of an audio-guide application for Java (Android), Swift (iOS) and React Native (Android and iOS) is made. This work shows that Swift is the solution with the lowest development time, while React Native and Java have very similar overall development times, however with the particularity that React Native supports both the two main mobile operating systems.