A Comparative Study of Android and iOS for Accessing Internet Streaming Services

Android and iOS devices are leading the mobile device market. While various user experiences have been reported from the general user community about their differences, such as battery lifetime, display, and touchpad control, few in-depth reports can be found about their comparative performance when receiving the increasingly popular Internet streaming services. Today, video traffic starts to dominate the Internet mobile data traffic. In this work, focusing on Internet streaming accesses, we set to analyze and compare the performance when Android and iOS devices are accessing Internet streaming services. Starting from the analysis of a server-side workload collected from a top mobile streaming service provider, we find Android and iOS use different approaches to request media content, leading to different amounts of received traffic on Android and iOS devices when a same video clip is accessed. Further studies on the client side show that different data requesting approaches (standard HTTP request vs. HTTP range request) and different buffer management methods (static vs. dynamic) are used in Android and iOS mediaplayers, and their interplay has led to our observations. Our empirical results and analysis provide some insights for the current Android and iOS users, streaming service providers, and mobile mediaplayer developers.