Evaluating Application Scenarioswith React Native : A Comparative Study between Native and ReactNative Development

Abstract: There are multiple ways of creating a modern mobile application and differentcombinations of programming languages and tools can be used to suite specificneeds.Typically, open market products need to support various platforms which, due tomultiple code bases, might lead to difficulties with maintenance and new featuredeployment.React Native is a JavaScript library, announced by Facebook in 2015, that provides auniversal pattern for creating mobile applications for Android and iOS. Theframework handles all data models and business logic using JavaScript whichenables large amounts of code to be shared between different operating systems.The cost of these advantages, however, is not well documented and it is possiblethat React Native may not be suitable in certain application scenarios.In this thesis, React Native is benchmarked in terms of performance and userexperience to evaluate which application scenarios that are suitable for theframework and which are not. Benchmarks show that React Native deliversanimation performance close to its native counterpart while computationallyintensive tasks took at least 27x more time to execute. The measurements alsoshows that React Native applications consumed 124% more battery and required25% more time to launch whilst also requiring significantly more memory.Based on the results, and evaluated differences in the development process, thisthesis has concluded that React Native is a viable option to native development inscenarios which does not rely on heavy background calculations, have strict limitson resource usage or need very specific Android features or components. Ideally,React Native is suitable for developers with web experience or scenarios whererapid deployment changes are desirable.