Resource utilization for access to web-based services: Browser versus mobile application

摘要

The proliferation of mobile device platforms and operating systems has resulted in an increased challenge for developers and mobile users alike. While developers face fragmentation issues in their efforts, mobile users find an increasing number of online services to access in a variety of ways. The increased adoption of HTML5-based service access methods, however, allows to circumvent some of these problems by employing a browser-based service access, either in form of hybrid applications or by directly employing a mobile web browser installed on a user's device. We present and employ a framework that can be readily utilized to perform repeated evaluations of applications on mobile devices with the Android OS to provide statistically meaningful performance measurements. Specifically, we compare dedicated and browser-based access of online social network services with respect to their corresponding CPU and memory resource utilizations. We find a trade-off between increased CPU usage for browser-based service access and increased memory usage when accessing the services with their dedicated mobile applications. Depending on current system resource utilizations, it might hence be advantageous to choose one over the other.