Ecological Impact of Native vs. Cross-Platform Mobile Apps: a Preliminary Study
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The document discusses the ecological impact of native versus cross-platform mobile apps, highlighting the significant energy consumption and carbon emissions associated with app development. It presents preliminary findings from a comparative study using five different development methods, noting that native development often yields the best performance while cross-platform options like Flutter show promise for energy savings. The study emphasizes the need for further research to comprehensively understand the environmental implications of app development methodologies.
![Eco-friendly dev stack
Patterns & tactics
Apply best coding practices to
save energy [3]
3
Langages & runtime
Choose energy-efficient
programming languages [2]
2
Development
methodology
Choose the right type of
development to save energy [1]
1
[1] R. Horn et al., “Native vs Web Apps: Comparing the Energy Consumption and Performance of Android Apps and their Web Counterparts”, IEEE/ACM MOBILESoft 2023, Melbourne, Australia, pp. 44-54.
[2] Rui Pereira et al. “Ranking Programming Languages by Energy Efficiency”. Science of Computer Programming, volume 205. Elsevier, 2021
[3] Luis Cruz and Rui Abreu. 2019. “Catalog of energy patterns for mobile applications”. Empirical Software. Engineering. 24, 4 (August 2019)](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/a-mobile2023-230916160227-fed040e1/85/Ecological-Impact-of-Native-vs-Cross-Platform-Mobile-Apps-a-Preliminary-Study-4-320.jpg)
Ecological Impact of Native vs. Cross-Platform Mobile Apps: a Preliminary Study
- 1. Ecological Impact of Native vs. Cross-Platform Mobile Apps: a Preliminary Study Vincent Frattaroli, Olivier Le Goaër, Olivier Philippot The 6th International Workshop on Advances in Mobile App Analysis September 15th , 2023
- 2. Mobile software eaten the world… From “There's an App for That” (Apple, 2009), 13 years of continuous growth Mobile software has yielded new addictive behaviours* The industry of mobile development has undergone profound mutations 6.84 billion smartphones 8.93 million mobile apps *Richard J.E. James et al., “Understanding the construction of ‘behavior’ in smartphone addiction: A scoping review”, Addictive Behaviors (Volume 137), February 2023
- 3. …while the world is facing climate change Manufacturing user devices is the primary source of GHG in ICT field Increasingly demanding software is driving the need to renew hardware Software developers must play their part in the Green Deal (Europe) Software-driven hardware obsolescence
- 4. Eco-friendly dev stack Patterns & tactics Apply best coding practices to save energy [3] 3 Langages & runtime Choose energy-efficient programming languages [2] 2 Development methodology Choose the right type of development to save energy [1] 1 [1] R. Horn et al., “Native vs Web Apps: Comparing the Energy Consumption and Performance of Android Apps and their Web Counterparts”, IEEE/ACM MOBILESoft 2023, Melbourne, Australia, pp. 44-54. [2] Rui Pereira et al. “Ranking Programming Languages by Energy Efficiency”. Science of Computer Programming, volume 205. Elsevier, 2021 [3] Luis Cruz and Rui Abreu. 2019. “Catalog of energy patterns for mobile applications”. Empirical Software. Engineering. 24, 4 (August 2019)
- 5. Trendy cross-platform solutions “Write once, run everywhere” motto Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile React Native Flutter
- 6. Joint work for this study Greenspector 03 ● Mobile measurement company ● Testbench for Android and iOS apps University of Pau / E2S 02 ● Software engineering team ● Research on “Green Software” inside|app 01 ● Mobile app development company ● Build validation app
- 8. Crosscutting the carbon 3-tier Device Network infrastructure Cloud/Data center (including app stores)
- 9. 5 codebases, 8 app variants Development kind Framework (version) Target OS Native Swift (5.6) Native Kotlin (1.6.10) Crossplatform KMM (0.3.2) Crossplatform Flutter (2.16.0) Crossplatform React Native (0.69) https://github.com/orgs/TurnipOffApp/repositories
- 10. Preliminary remarks There is no zoo of mobile apps coded using different methods Coding 1 realistic app using the 5 methods is time consuming (≅10 man-days) Performing such a comparative study on dozens of apps is cumbersome Native & cross-platform development is evolving at a very fast pace
- 11. Validation app (Worst Movies) Screenshots (iOS) Baseline for a fair comparison ● End user viewpoint ○ Same look&feel ○ Same journey ● Developer viewpoint ○ No advanced architecture ○ No fine-tuning ○ No third-party libraries
- 12. Testbench in a nutshell powered by Greenspector Developer’s computer GDSL test script App under test 1 - Send test file and app package Real Smartphones Test bench Server Core server Back-end Server Greenspector Premises Web Interface (Dashboard) Result recording 3 - Displaying results 2 - Waiting for live measurements Communication needed if application requires backend access Communication needed if application requires backend access Domain-specific language for fully automated testing
- 13. Results (partial) Development App size (KB) Data transfer (KB) Energy (mAh) Swift N/A 216 N/A ? N/A 8,59 Kotlin 1200 N/A 944 N/A 21,60 N/A KMM 3600 1600 932 ? 21,66 ? Flutter 17500 18000 1190 ? 18,27 9,19 React Native 27300 13100 706 ? 19,45 11,62 Average data from 10 repetitions
- 14. At first glance Native development is indisputably the best solution on both OS React Native is by far the less data-intensive solution over the network on Android (No data regarding iOS) Flutter is doing very well in terms of energy-savings, on both OS
- 15. Takeways Targeting iOS only Apps with few network interactions Other cases Always Native development In general, Native development No general rule of thumb But nothing beats an app “sober-by-design”
- 16. Conclusion Ecological impact of app development methods is an understudied topic Including iOS in the study is our pride, but also our weakness (missing values) This study ought to be continued: repeat experiment, new releases, etc. Our github repo may bootstrap research works about native vs. cross-platform
- 17. Thank you for your attention