An evaluation of MobileCross-platform Developmentusing React Native and NativeAndroid

Abstract: Instead of developing the same mobile application multiple times for different platforms, Androidand iOS, there are frameworks which allow the developer to deploy an application to severalplatforms using the same code base. One of these frameworks is React Native, a JavaScriptframework for developing mobile applications for both Android and iOS. Native Androidapplications are developed using Java or Kotlin. This paper evaluates React Native bycomparing it to an Android application written in Java. The evaluation is done by developing anapplication in each of the two technologies and comparing performance. The performance isevaluated by measuring frame rate during an animation and the average time to solvecomputational tasks. To get accurate measurements a tool called Systrace is used. The resultsshow that for graphical animations, applications developed using React Native have similarperformance as natively developed Android applications. At the same time, React Native is notvery good at pure computational tasks where natively developed Android applications performbetter