A comparison of Ionic 2 versus React Native and Android in terms of performance, by comparing the performance of applications

Abstract: Nowadays almost everyone has a smart phone. In addition, as more people use smart phones more applications are being developed for smart phones. Each operating system on the smart phone market has its own applications. Up until a few years ago, developers had to develop an exclusive application for each operating system in order to cover the whole market. A number of cross-platform frameworks have emerged. These frameworks enable developers to use one code base for every operating system. To be able to use most of the code for all platforms makes it easier to maintain and evolve the application. Two of the frameworks that allow cross-platform development are React Native and Ionic. The purpose and goal of the thesis is to evaluate if Ionic 2 is eligible to use as a cross-platform framework in terms of performance. The method used to achieve the goal is based on replication. An application made in React Native is replicated by using Ionic 2. The applications are then evaluated with focus on performance. The applications are evaluated using AndroidViewClient and Trepn profiler. AndriodViewClient is run outside of the OS of the Android device and can control the GUI of a device. AndroidViewClient is used to automate the tests. The metrics used for evaluating the performance are CPU load, memory usage, battery power usage, the size of the application and the size of the Android package kit. Trepn profiler is an application that is installed on the device. Trepn profiler has access to the hardware of the device and is therefore used to measure the first three mentioned metrics.