Developing a framework to evaluate the performance of mobile development technologies

Abstract

Mobile devices and applications have become invaluable tools in modern society. There are many approaches to mobile development, and for each one, there are multiple mobile development technologies. Performance is a crucial feature that can influence the success of a mobile application. There are many studies in literature evaluating mobile development technology performance. There is, however, no framework available to assess the performance of mobile development technologies. The mobile industry is rapidly advancing, and the results of many performance-evaluation studies are no longer representative of the mobile development industry. For the academic community to keep up with industry, a continuous effort should be exercised to research the performance of mobile development technologies. This study aims to develop a framework to evaluate the performance of mobile development technologies. The framework consists of four phases: selection, implementation, measurement, and evaluation. The developed framework is then applied by conducting a performance evaluation that compares five popular modern mobile development technologies. The mobile technologies comprise Android Native and four cross-platform technologies: Ionic, Flutter, React Native, and Xamarin. In addition, four benchmark tests were created, with CPU usage, RAM usage, and execution time being the selected performance metrics. The results showed that Android Native was the best-performing technology overall; however, using the statistical analysis methods of the framework, it was determined that in tests where Developing a framework to evaluate the performance of mobile development technologies iv Android Native performed the best, it never performed significantly better than the second-ranking technology. The study concludes with a discussion on the work done. The application of the developed framework has shown that it can indeed be used to evaluate mobile development technology performance and can be used in future performance-evaluation studies. The research objectives of this study were met, and recommendations for future work are given.