Characterizing RESTful Web Services Usage on Smartphones: A Tale of Native Apps and Web Apps

The burst of Web-based Restful services brings us a number of facilities in our life and work. We are used to take smartphones to access these Web services, like location-based services, weather search, mapping, social networking, et al. On smartphones, we have two options of service consumers, a.k.a, Native apps and Web apps. Despite the platform-independence, Web apps are claimed to provide the same features and comparable user experiences with native apps. However, one fact is that more and more people prefer native apps rather than Web apps. In this paper, we make an empirical study on characterizing the performance disparity of native apps and Web apps. Given the same functionalities provided by the same service providers, we explore the Restful Web services that are used by native apps and Web apps. With HTTP-level trace analysis, we demystify the workflows on how native apps and Web apps use Web services and summarize different service usage patterns from architectural style perspective. Then we characterize the performance differences between native apps and Web apps on realizing Restful Web services including GET, DELETE, PUT & POST, in terms of number of network connections, response time, and data drain, given the same functional features. Our observations reveal that Web apps do not always perform worse than native apps using Restful Web services under the same context. We further propose some implications to improve both native apps and Web apps on smartphones.