Android : Resource Consumption in Native and Web Applications

There is an ongoing debate by people in the industry whether to make native or web applications. These discussions mostly surround issues about development costs, user experience and capabilities. Another aspect of this debate is the fact that mobile devices have varying hardware specifications which is another factor to consider when making this decision. What we want to shed some light on is how performance is affected on the device when using these two different approaches of application development. The use of CPU/RAM and Energy is our primary concern and in our experiment we measure these values on two similar applications where one uses Nested Layouts and the other a WebView. The experiment was made on three different devices with varying specifications. What we found was that Web applications have a bigger impact on overall performance and because of this use more battery. While the debate certainly won't come to a close with results they are conclusive when it comes to the topic of performance and will be of value to developers who are concerned about it