Native vs Web Apps: Comparing the Energy Consumption and Performance of Android Apps and their Web Counterparts

Context. Many Internet content platforms, such as Spotify and YouTube, provide their services via both native and Web apps. Even though those apps provide similar features to the end user, using their native version or Web counterpart might lead to different levels of energy consumption and performance. Goal. The goal of this study is to empirically assess the energy consumption and performance of native and Web apps in the context of Internet content platforms on Android.Method. We select 10 Internet content platforms across 5 categories. Then, we measure them based on the energy consumption, network traffic volume, CPU load, memory load, and frame time of their native and Web versions; then, we statistically analyze the collected measures and report our results.Results. We confirm that native apps consume significantly less energy than their Web counterparts, with large effect size. Web apps use more CPU and memory, with statistically significant difference and large effect size. Therefore, we conclude that native apps tend to require fewer hardware resources than their corresponding Web versions. The network traffic volume exhibits statistically significant difference in favour of native apps, with small effect size. Our results do not allow us to draw any conclusion in terms of frame time.Conclusions. Based on our results, we advise users to access Internet contents using native apps over Web apps, when possible. Also, the results of this study motivate further research on the optimization of the usage of runtime resources of mobile Web apps and Android browsers.