Hybrid application development : A comparison between native Android application and Ionic 2 application

• Main Author: Krispinsson, Tobias
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Linköpings universitet, Programvara och system 2017
• Subjects: Ionic; Hybrid development; Cross platform; Software Engineering; Programvaruteknik
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-140015

In this thesis, the newly released framework Ionic 2, which claims to fix the problems cross platform frameworks has suffered from concerning bad performance and bad user experience, has been evaluated. The study has focused on the Android platform by comparing a native developed application to an Ionic 2 developed application. The comparison has been made on performance and user experience. As an extent, Ionic 2 are also compared to another evaluation study made for React Native, to see how the two frameworks differ, both performance wise and user experience wise. The native application performs better in all performance tests, even though the difference only was a few percent for memory usage and battery consumption. In the user tests, the result was of different nature. Some users did not notice any differences between the applications, whilst some had big concerns with how the application behaved. The overall conclusion is that Ionic still has some way to go to compete with native applications. If considering using Ionic 2, you need to be aware of the flaws it has. From the data gathered for this study, React Native is considered to be better than Ionic, but with new updates coming continuously, Ionic is improving every day.