  Context. Many Internet content platforms, such as Spotify and YouTube,
provide their services via both native and Web apps. Even though those apps
provide similar features to the end user, using their native version or Web
counterpart might lead to different levels of energy consumption and
performance. Goal. The goal of this study is to empirically assess the energy
consumption and performance of native and Web apps in the context of Internet
content platforms on Android. Method. We select 10 Internet content platforms
across 5 categories. Then, we measure them based on the energy consumption,
network traffic volume, CPU load, memory load, and frame time of their native
and Web versions; then, we statistically analyze the collected measures and
report our results. Results. We confirm that native apps consume significantly
less energy than their Web counterparts, with large effect size. Web apps use
more CPU and memory, with statistically significant difference and large effect
size. Therefore, we conclude that native apps tend to require fewer hardware
resources than their corresponding Web versions. The network traffic volume
exhibits statistically significant difference in favour of native apps, with
small effect size. Our results do not allow us to draw any conclusion in terms
of frame time. Conclusions. Based on our results, we advise users to access
Internet contents using native apps over Web apps, when possible. Also, the
results of this study motivate further research on the optimization of the
usage of runtime resources of mobile Web apps and Android browsers.
