Understanding the Energy, Performance, and Programming Effort Trade-Offs of Android Persistence Frameworks

One of the fundamental building blocks of a mobile application is the ability to persist program data between different invocations. Referred to as persistence, this functionality is commonly implemented by means of persistence frameworks. When choosing a particular framework, Android—the most popular mobile platform—offers a wide variety of options to developers. Unfortunately, the energy, performance, and programming effort trade-offs of these frameworks are poorly understood, leaving the Android developer in the dark trying to select the most appropriate option for their applications. To address this problem, this paper reports on the results of the first systematic study of six Android persistence frameworks (i.e., ActiveAndroid, greenDAO, OrmLite, Sugar ORM, Android SQLite, and Java Realm) in their application to and performance with popular benchmarks, such as DaCapo. Having measured and analyzed the energy, performance, and programming effort trade-offs for each framework, we present a set of practical guidelines for the developer to choose between Android persistence frameworks. Our findings can also help the framework developers to optimize their products to meet the desired design objectives.