Animations in Cross-Platform Mobile Applications: An Evaluation of Tools, Metrics and Performance.

Andreas Biørn-Hansen,Tor-Morten Grønli,Gheorghita Ghinea

doi:10.3390/s19092081

Andreas Biørn-Hansen, Tor-Morten Grønli + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/s19092081

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Abstract

Along with the proliferation of high-end and performant mobile devices, we find that the inclusion of visually animated user interfaces are commonplace, but that research on their performance is scarce. Thus, for this study, eight mobile apps have been developed for scrutiny and assessment to report on the device hardware impact and penalties caused by transitions and animations, with an emphasis on apps generated using cross-platform development frameworks. The tasks we employ for animation performance measuring, are those of (i) a complex animation consisting of multiple elements, (ii) the opening sequence of a side menu navigation pattern, and (iii) a transition animation during in-app page navigation. We employ multiple performance profiling tools, and scrutinize metrics including frames per second (FPS), CPU usage, device memory usage and GPU memory usage, all to uncover the impact caused by executing transitions and animations. We uncover important differences in device hardware utilization during animations across the different cross-platform technologies employed. Additionally, Android and iOS are found to differ greatly in terms of memory consumption, CPU usage and rendered FPS, a discrepancy that is true for both the native and cross-platform apps. The findings we report are indeed factors contributing to the complexity of app development.

Highlights

Nowadays, we frequently encounter animated graphical user interfaces in mobile applications [1], or apps for short
In studies scrutinizing the performance of cross-platform generated apps, experiments tend to focus on testing and measuring device and platform features, and their effect on hardware and device performance. Examples of such features typically include those of device camera, user’s calendar and contact list, and geolocation and accelerometer [25]. While studies including those discussed throughout this section are of utmost importance to our understanding of limitations, constraints and possibilities posed by cross-platform frameworks, we simultaneously identify a lack of experiments focusing on performance testing graphical user interfaces (GUIs)
While there are manifold studies identified on assessing the performance of cross-platform generated apps, we found a research gap in the lack of performance-oriented evaluations of user interfaces in such apps

Summary

Introduction

We frequently encounter animated graphical user interfaces in mobile applications [1], or apps for short. Throughout a regular day’s worth of mobile device usage, we are likely to have been exposed to a multitude of different animations. Examples include the loading spinners appearing upon refreshing social media feeds, the animated proposed travel path drawn by the Uber app on-top of their Google Map component, and the view-filling animation transition triggered when launching an app on an iOS device [3]. It should be safe to assume that animations and transitions are integral parts of modern user interfaces, on performance- and view-estate constrained handheld mobile devices. Do app developers face such inherent device-related constraints, they are exposed to a myriad of technological options to choose between prior to even beginning development

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