Comparative analysis of installation package size and startup time of a mobile application

This article explores three technological stacks for mobile application development on the Android operating system: Android (Native), Flutter, and React Native. It presents the results of an experimental comparison focusing on two important parameters that directly influence the user’s experience: the size of the installation package (APK) and the time to initial display (TTID) in a cold start scenario. To ensure objective comparison, identical conditions were used: the same processor architec-ture (ARM64-v8a), the same screen density (xxxhdpi), and the same build settings (release mode). The study of a newly created project showed that the smallest APK size was achieved using Flutter with the R8 code optimizer enabled. This indicates a high degree of default optimization and the absence of numerous dependencies at the initial stage. Android (Native) showed the best results in launch time (TTID), due to the lack of additional initialization layers. Although React Native lagged behind its com-petitors in both parameters, it still demonstrated solid performance that does not warrant its exclusion from consideration. TTID was measured on a mid-range smartphone, Google Pixel 3a, to evaluate this parameter on a processor that is considered weak by modern standards — the Snapdragon 670. The obtained results confirmed the feasibility of using cross-platform frameworks even on outdated devices without a significant loss in user experience quality. The article concludes that the choice of development stack should depend not only on technical characteristics but also on project specifics, team expertise, devel-opment timelines, maintenance demands, and desired time-to-market. Therefore, each of the reviewed approaches can be used under suitable conditions and is capable of providing a comfortable and stable user experience.