Att välja cross-platform-ramverk för mobilapplikationsutveckling

Abstract

The purpose of the project is to evaluate differences in performance between the cross-platform frameworks Xamarin (consisting of Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.IOS), Xamarin.Forms and Flutter. Another part of the purpose is to evaluate if it’s technically possible, for a specific company and their application, to switch from Xamarin.Forms to Flutter, and if so; what advantages and disadvantages such a switch would bring.<br><br> A set of small applications was developed for each framework in order to test the performance of the frameworks with regard to startup time and installation size. In addition to this, a prototype application was developed to investigate if Flutter is suitable for applications where there’s a technical requirement for Bluetooth communication.<br><br> No significant differences in performance between the frameworks were observed on IOS. On Android, the test results show that Flutter performs significantly better in all tests compared to Xamarin.Forms, and have slightly better performance than Xamarin.Android. Flutter also provides useful tools that can help improve the development process over Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms. The project also resulted in the development of a working prototype application, meeting the technical requirements. For developing new cross-platform applications from the start, we recommend using Flutter. However, in the case of the company, it might be possible to significantly improve performance of an existing application (on Android) by switching from Xamarin.Forms to Xamarin without having to rework their entire codebase.<br><br> This thesis is written in Swedish.