A Comparative Study of Responsiveness of Native Applications and Progressive Web Applications

Abstract: The development of Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) as opposed to Native Applications (NAs) has experienced a significant shift in recent years in the mobile application market. PWAs are more and more common since they are affordable, simple to use, and cross-platform compatible. Even so, there is an ongoing discussion and lacking research about which application can deliver a better user experience, which is what this thesis aimed to research. This was accomplished by developing two identical applications, one PWA and one NA, and comparing them in terms of responsiveness. Responsiveness was quantified by measuring the complexity in terms of computational time for each functionality within each application. The applications were developed using the two React frameworks named React JS and React Native, for the PWA and NA, respectively. Thus, the main comparison was between these two frameworks, and not PWAs and NAs in general. The goal is to help developers decide which application out of the two is more suitable, depending on the possible functionalities that their application is considered to have. The functionalities that were chosen were all different but deemed to be relevant to the functionalities present in some of the largest mobile applications. Functionalities relevant to social media were chosen, such as image and tweet searching. Additional functionalities include geolocation and a word counter. The former was chosen for the prevalence of geolocation-based applications, while the latter was chosen as a means to compare the computational power of each application. The results showed that the PWA was considerably more capable when it came to executing the image search word counter, and tweet search functionality, as it was able to render and handle the data considerably faster than the NA. When it came to the geolocation functionality, however, the NA was the faster application.