GraphQL or REST for Mobile Applications?

Abstract

Currently, GraphQL has emerged as a query language for developing web APIs that propose to improve several data access problems of RESTful APIs. The present paper aims to study the effects on software quality of APIs developed with REST and GraphQL architectures consumed from mobile applications. For this, we design a computational experiment that compares the quality characteristic “performance efficiency" of mobile application consumption to three APIs; one GraphQL API and two REST APIs (one exposes complex queries on several endpoints, the other exposes complex queries on a single endpoint). The results show that the software quality of the API developed with GraphQL architecture is higher than that developed with REST architecture.