I've noticed that an app that I'm currently working on is starting to have a nice amount of external native modules (some open source some I wrote myself).
I know that when Tianium app starts the framework verifies the license of the module against Appcelerator servers. Simple logic is that if there is a big number of modules the more licenses it will have to verify. Also, I'm guessing, some part of the modules has to be loaded at app start.
Modules also add to the size of the application (of course depending on the module). But in my case most of them are simple, yet I'm guessing they have some common "framework" elements in them that is probably duplicated between modules.
So my question is, should modules be avoided as much as possible? do they have performance impact on app load? on app in general? app size?
Modules will have an impact on app load and app size definitely. Generally if we load the modules in alloy.js then ti will have to spend more time loading them and preparing them to be used by the application. Also, the modules are bundled with the executable (APK or IPA). So the bigger the size of the SO, the greater will be the size of the executable.