The heterogeneity of the leading mobile platforms in terms of user interfaces, user experience, programming language, and ecosystem have made cross-platform development frameworks popular. These aid the creation of mobile applications – apps – that can be executed across the target platforms (typically Android and iOS) with minimal to no platform-specific code. Due to the cost- and time-saving possibilities introduced through adopting such a framework, researchers and practitioners alike have taken an interest in the underlying technologies. Examining the body of knowledge, we, nonetheless, frequently encounter discussions on the drawbacks of these frameworks, especially with regard to the performance of the apps they generate. Motivated by the ongoing discourse and a lack of empirical evidence, we scrutinised the essential piece of the cross-platform frameworks: the bridge enabling cross-platform code to communicate with the underlying operating system and device hardware APIs. The study we present in the article benchmarks and measures the performance of this bridge to reveal its associated overhead in Android apps. The development of the artifacts for this experiment was conducted using five cross-platform development frameworks to generate Android apps, in addition to a baseline native Android app implementation. Our results indicate that – for Android apps – the use of cross-platform frameworks for the development of mobile apps may lead to decreased performance compared to the native development approach. Nevertheless, certain cross-platform frameworks can perform equally well or even better than native on certain metrics which highlights the importance of well-defined technical requirements and specifications for deliberate selection of a cross-platform framework or overall development approach.

中文翻译：

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跨平台移动开发框架性能开销的实证研究

领先的移动平台在用户界面、用户体验、编程语言和生态系统方面的异构性使得跨平台开发框架流行起来。这些有助于创建移动应用程序 - 应用程序 - 可以在目标平台（通常是 Android 和 iOS）上执行，只需最少甚至没有平台特定的代码。由于采用这样的框架可以节省成本和时间，因此研究人员和从业人员都对底层技术产生了兴趣。然而，在检查知识体系时，我们经常会遇到关于这些框架的缺点的讨论，特别是关于它们生成的应用程序的性能。受到正在进行的讨论和缺乏经验证据的推动，我们仔细研究了跨平台框架的基本部分：使跨平台代码能够与底层操作系统和设备硬件 API 通信的桥梁。我们在文章中介绍的研究对这座桥的性能进行了基准测试和测量，以揭示其在 Android 应用程序中的相关开销。除了基线原生 Android 应用实现之外，本实验的工件开发还使用五个跨平台开发框架来生成 Android 应用。我们的结果表明，对于 Android 应用程序，与原生开发方法相比，使用跨平台框架开发移动应用程序可能会导致性能下降。尽管如此，