Mobile Multiplatform Development: An Experiment for Performance Analysis

The variety of operating platforms in mobile devices involves separate standards, programming languages, and distribution markets. This poses a challenge on software developers, as to select what platform to develop first for. Web-based multiplatform development tools offer a solution under the principle of developing once using target-agnostic technologies, able to be deployed in multiple platforms; nonetheless, it has been reported that web-based applications suffer significant performance decreases. In this paper, we present a study to analyze the performance of mobile web applications using PhoneGap and Android OS to understand the most relevant performance matters raised by multiplatform tools. We report an experiment focused on evaluating execution time, to characterize the performance overhead found in a web app with respect to an identical native application.