Browsing by Author "Nieminen, Jeremi"

This thesis examines the render speeds of WebViews in React Native applications. React Native is a popular cross-platform framework for developing mobile applications, and WebViews allow embedding web content within mobile applications. While WebViews offer the advantage of bringing readily available web content in applications, the cost of using this technology in terms of applications responsiveness is not well researched. The goal of this thesis is to evaluate this cost so that developers and stakeholders can make more informed decisions regarding the use of WebViews in React Native applications. A series of tests was performed using a React Native application that was developed for the purpose of this study. In these tests, we rendered WebViews and similarly appearing views that consist of React Native components, and measured their mean render times. Our analysis of these results revealed that using React Native components instead of WebViews offers significant benefits in terms of rendering performance on both, iOS and Android platforms. The use of WebViews in rendering user interfaces can bring a notable disadvantage in the matter of user experience, especially on Android devices. These findings suggest that rendering Native user interface components instead of WebViews should be preferred if we want to maximize user experience across different devices and platforms.