In this thesis, the newly released framework Ionic 2, which claims to fix the problems cross platform frameworks has suffered from concerning bad performance and bad user experience, has been evaluated. The study has focused on the Android platform by comparing a native developed application to an Ionic 2 developed application. The comparison has been made on performance and user experience. As an extent, Ionic 2 are also compared to another evaluation study made for React Native, to see how the two frameworks differ, both performance wise and user experience wise. The native application performs better in all performance tests, even though the difference only was a few percent for memory usage and battery consumption. In the user tests, the result was of different nature. Some users did not notice any differences between the applications, whilst some had big concerns with how the application behaved. The overall conclusion is that Ionic still has some way to go to compete with native applications. If considering using Ionic 2, you need to be aware of the flaws it has. From the data gathered for this study, React Native is considered to be better than Ionic, but with new updates coming continuously, Ionic is improving every day.

The use of mobile devices and social media has been increasing dramatically and becoming critical for B2C businesses. Such businesses need to consider implementing e-commerce services in the mobile environment with social integration to satisfy their customers’ needs. Concepts like mobile commerce and social commerce are already being used extensively by many businesses. However, there are no clear guidelines in the literature on how to use mobile and social characteristics together for B2C e-commerce. Fusing these two concepts is what we call mobile social commerce (ms-commerce). In this thesis, we performed a thorough literature review to identify the characteristics of ms-commerce. The findings enabled us to first devise a proper definition for ms-commerce as the concept of performing online commercial activities in a mobile environment with the help of contributions from customers. Second, elements of the building blocks of ms-commerce, namely business models, m-commerce and s-commerce were identified based on commonly accepted fundamentals of the related concepts. Each building block has a critical role in increasing the value and efficiency of the product/service being delivered online by B2C businesses. We propose a mobile social commerce design framework along with a modular design model consisting of a generic class diagram that can be used for designing and developing ms-commerce applications that fit the specific needs of businesses. Businesses can choose the right elements to integrate in their ms-commerce application with the purpose of increasing the efficiency and integrating the social participation of customers. Three different scenarios were devised, and three mobile app prototypes were developed to support them, using the design model of our proposed framework. Finally, in light of our experience in developing ms-commerce applications, we discussed and contrasted the three different mobile development strategies, namely native, hybrid and web-based.

Syfte – Studiens syfte är att undersöka hybridapplikationers prestanda i olika situationer för att ta reda på varför de upplevs som långsamma. För att uppnå syftet besvaras följande frågeställningar: Hur presterar hybridapplikationer jämfört med nativapplikationer beräkningsmässigt Är JavaScript-biblioteken anledningen till hybridapplikationers sämre prestanda, och vilket av de bibliotek som undersöks är det mest lämpade för bästa prestanda? Kan hybridapplikationer hantera stora datamängder med IndexedDB utan att bli oresponsiva? Metod – Studien använder sig av en experimentell forskningsmetod där hypoteser och förutsägelser formuleras och sedan testas för att besvara frågeställningarna. Resultat – Resultatet från studien visar att prestandan för mobila hybrid-applikationer är i de flesta fall, vid utförande av samma uppgift, underlägsen den för dess motsvarande nativapplikationer. Resultaten visar även att prestandan påverkas av vilket JavaScript-bibliotek som används men att biblioteken inte är anledningen till hybridapplikationers långsamma prestanda. Vidare visar resultaten att hybridapplikationer kan hantera stora datamängder utan att bli oresponsiva. Implikationer – Studien bidrar till att bredda den kunskapsbas som finns om hybridapplikationers prestanda och ger framtida forskning referensdata att bygga vidare på. Studien påvisar dessutom att hybridapplikationer fortfarande är ett alternativ, i synnerhet för företag som vill spara tid och som ej kräver applikationer som utför tunga beräkningar. Begränsningar – Användandet av applikationer som sannolikt inte förekommer i ett verklighetstroget scenario bidrog till resultat som inte har stor relevans inom de användningsområden som finns för hybridapplikationer. / Purpose – The purpose of this thesis is to examine the performance of hybrid mobile applications in different situations to find out why they are perceived as slow. To fulfill the purpose, the following research questions will be answered: How do hybrid applications perform compared to native applications computationally? Are the JavaScript-libraries the reason behind the slower performance of hybrid applications, and which one of the libraries that are examined is most suitable for the best performance? Can hybrid applications manage large amounts of data with IndexedDB without getting unresponsive? Method – The study uses an experimental research method where hypotheses and predictions are formulated and later tested to answer the research questions. Results – The results show that the performance of mobile hybrid applications are in most cases, when performing the same task, inferior to that of corresponding native applications. The results also show that the performance is affected by which JavaScript-library that is being used, but that it is not the main reason for hybrid applications poor performance. They also show that hybrid applications can manage large amounts of data without becoming unresponsive. Implications – The study contributes to broadening the knowledge available on the performance of mobile hybrid applications and provides future research with reference data to build upon. The study also demonstrate that hybrid applications still is an alternative, especially for enterprises who want to save time and does not demand applications that perform heavy computations. Research limitations – The use of applications that most likely would not occur in a realistic scenario contributed with results that have little relevance in the areas of use that exists for hybrid applications.