Comparing Performance Parameters of Mobile App Development Strategies

Mobile cross-platform tools (CPTs) provide an interesting alternative to native development. Cross-platform tools aim at sharing a significant portion of the application codebase between the implementations for the different platforms. This can drastically decrease the development costs of mobile applications. There is, however, some reluctance of mobile application developers to adopt these tools. One of the reasons is that the landscape of CPTs is so diverse that it is hard to select the most suitable CPT to implement a specific application. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it presents a performance analysis of a fully functional mobile application implemented with ten cross-platform tools and native for Android, iOS and Windows Phone. The performance tests are executed on a high- and low-end Android and iOS device, and a Windows Phone device. Second, based on the performance analysis, general conclusions of which application developers should be aware when selecting a specific (type of) cross-platform tool are drawn.