Performance analysis of mobile applications developed with different programming tools

This study examines the efficiency of certain software tasks in applications developed using three frameworks for the Android system: Android SDK, Qt and AppInventor. The results obtained using the Android SDK provided the benchmark for comparison with other frameworks. Three test applications were implemented. Each of them had the same functionality. Performance in the following aspects was tested: sorting a list of items using recursion by means of the Quicksort algorithm, access time to a location from a GPS sensor, duration time for reading the entire list of phone contacts, saving large and small files, reading large and small files, image conversion to greyscale, playback time of a music file, including the preparation time. The results of the Android SDK are good. Unexpectedly, it is not the fastest tool, but the time for performing most operations can be considered satisfactory. The Qt framework is overall about 34% faster than the Android SDK. The worst in terms of overall performance is the AppInventor: it is, on average, over 626 times slower than Android SDK.