Browsing by Author "Paksula, Matti"

Mobile apps are intended to be created with mobile platforms development tools and programming languages. This native development requires specialized skills and can therefore be prohibitively expensive. HTML5 hybrid app development is a popular alternative for native mobile app development. This development model allows developers to use standard web technologies and the end result can be indistinguishable from a native app by its visual representation. This model enables faster iteration speed, allows any web developer to build apps and supports simultaneous cross-platform development. However, since the web technology is not as performant as native, these hybrid apps have often been criticized for being noticeably 'laggy' by the app developer community and end users. One of the key components that affects HTML5 hybrid apps performance is the native bridge used in the app. This component bridges the embedded HTML5 application to the device features that wouldn't otherwise be available (such as writing to a file on the device's file system). The native bridge is one of the few components that a developer can freely change. Selecting the best native bridge for the app's needs is important as an inefficient native bridge can cause human noticeable delay in the app. The performance of native bridges has been acknowledged in academia and industry, but very little researched systematically. This thesis introduces a systematic method to evaluate native bridges performance. Along with this method, this thesis also describes a new open source tool implementing this method for benchmarking different native bridges. This tool hosts reference implementation for 32 native bridges. Example results from a test suite that tested all implemented native bridges with two embeddable web view engines (UIWebView and WKWebView) on four distinct iOS devices (two iPads, iPhone and iPod Touch) are evaluated. The results show that the majority of the known native bridge methods can cause human noticeable visual and auditory latency. It is also indicated that the performance is largely affected by app usage patterns. The slowest measured native bridge was over two times slower (from no delay to significant user interface delay) than the fastest one.