In March, Spaceport.io released part one of its study of HTML5 performance on iOS and Android and concluded that iOS smokes the competition in this regard. Today, it released part two, which compares HTML5 performance on mobile devices to the desktop web. Spaceport.io found that on average, the very best smartphones run HTML5 content 8x slower than a laptop computer.
The average comes from what Spaceport.io has found to be the best iOS phone and the best Android phone for HTML5: the iPhone 4S and the Samsung Galaxy S II. The iPhone 4S ran HTML5 6x slower than a unnamed MacBook model and the Samsung Galaxy S II ran it 10x slower — and that’s at the high end. Overall, HTML5 performance on smartphones is an average of 889x slower than on desktop computers. Some smartphones are even thousands of times slower. Pitting the two operating systems together, iOS is approximately 7x better at handling HTML5 than Android is.
After a series of different tests conducted on each smartphone, Spaceport.io noticed that basic HTML5 games actually perform quite well on iOS and Android. It’s only when switching to complex or graphically intense games do they both dramatically fall behind standard desktop performance.
“Cross platform mobile application development is currently the holy grail of the industry, seeking to move beyond the walled gardens of app stores. Although HTML5 is getting faster over time, the performance on mobile devices and browsers is still sorely lacking for the development of more complex applications,” said Spaceport.io founder Ben Savage. According to him, the purpose of the test was to make developers for browsers or apps aware of just how far they should push the envelope with HTML5 on modern mobile devices.