A Quantitative Assessment of Performance in Mobile App Development Tools

The popularity and maturity of mobile cross-platform tools increased considerably during the last years. They can be used to increase the efficiency during the development cycle of mobile applications. Although it is common knowledge that cross-platform tools come with a performance penalty, the size of the overhead is unclear. Our study targets the assessment of two representative cross-platform tools. This paper presents a quantitative performance analysis that is applied to a non-trivial, multi-screen app. Relevant performance properties on both low-end and high-end devices are evaluated and compared to a native Android and iOS implementation. We further reflect about the impact of the results on the user acceptance and experience, and define guidelines for the selection of a particular tool.