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Mobile Development Platform Performance Comparison

When choosing a development platform for building Mobile applications, performance is always one of the discussion points pro- or contra a specific technology. A lot of people claim that technology X is faster than technology Y without real numbers to proof their point. I did some tests myself and had mixed experiences using Cordova, Xamarin and Native Mobile development.
Last week I noticed this blog post by Kevin Ford: http://magenic.com/Blog/PostId/67/mobile-development-platform-performance. Kevin took the time to create a formal comparison between
  • Native (Objective-C 64 bit and Java)
  • Cordova (Multi-Device Hybrid Apps) using Intel's App Framework for the UI
  • Classic Xamarin (64 bit unified beta for iOS)
  • Xamarin.Forms (64 bit unified beta for iOS with beta version of Xamarin.Forms, note latest version of the unified API in the beta/alpha channels could not be used as it is not supported by Xamarin.Forms)
Go check out the full post for all the details, but some things that are worth to mention:
  • Xamarin is really fast, sometimes even faster than the native platform(e.g. Objective-C)
  • Xamarin.Forms has little overhead and gives almost the same numbers as for the classic Xamarin libraries
  • Cordova is a lot slower for CPU bound work but can keep up for service calls and serialization
Great post!

Remark: A colleague mentioned another performance comparison with similar conclusions; https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.string.isinterned(v=vs.110).aspx
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