HTML5 ARTICLE

March 12, 2012

Reasons to Prefer iOS Over Android: It Runs HTML5 Games Three Times Faster


A moment doesn’t pass without someone in this world talking about HTML5. Somewhere out there right now, someone’s developing an HTML5 application in this very moment. It’s become the latest craze in the beginning of the 21st century, and it will probably cause a revolution in the way we make Web material. Now that HTML5 has become a new standard for Web application development, iOS and Android (NewsAlert) have found a new theater of war to fight in. But who’s winning?

HTML5 is wonderful for vivid and beautiful Web pages, but it starts acting sluggishly when an operating system runs a game written with it. This is particularly due to the reliance on a browser interpreter engine rather than JavaScript libraries to send graphical information to the computer, which will then render the graphics and display them. It’s a rather daunting task especially for mobile devices.

Spaceport.io, a known maker of development environments, has conducted a study that will give us the final word on which of the two giants (iOS and Android) has the upper hand on HTML5 gaming. According to the study, we have a winner: Apple’s (News Alert) iOS, no contest.

Here’s the amazing part about HTML5: You can run the same game in any mobile operating system and environment that supports HTML5. There’s no extra plug-ins or third-party software to install. Many are convinced that this is the future of mobile gaming. Others disagree, saying that nothing runs better than native code or Java. The latter people have their merits. It is rather difficult to optimize HTML5 to run games faster.

Apple’s iOS broke through Android’s barriers and rendered HTML5 games three times faster than Android. The main part of the test wanted to see the capability of each operating system to animate images, which is the biggest factor affecting the speed at which games run. The benchmark tested how many images could move at the screen smoothly at 30 frames per second. That’s a pretty high place to set the bar.

Well, the test wasn’t run just once. The iOS device went above and beyond what Android could in many different situations. The benchmark tested was dubbed "PerfMark." The iPhone (NewsAlert) 4S scored 252 of these bad boys, while the iPad had a score of 327 PerfMarks. Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus phone, which runs on Android, scored only 147. Amazon’s Kindle Fire totally blew the test by scoring 25. Ouch!

Now, that’s no reason to abandon the Android franchise. Much of the performance issue has to do with embedded hardware as opposed to the operating system’s pure capabilities. Notice how the iPhone scored lower than the iPad. That’s because the iPhone didn’t have as high-performance hardware installed on it as the iPad did, regardless of the fact they run the same OS. We hope to see a further focus on higher-end hardware on Android phones in the future.




Edited by Carrie Schmelkin





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