App Store and Play Store are like a street full of food hawkers. With mobile applications of all sorts (native as well as a hybrid) doing brisk business on play stores. While native applications promise high performance and speed, hybrid applications win in case of reduced time, efforts and scalability. Hybrid applications (cross-platform applications) are beneficial only if they provide a user experience similar to those of native applications and access native API’s. Earlier developers used to stick to native SDK’s provided by Apple and Google but eventually, several alternatives have become available in form of Hybrid apps that provide almost similar user experience and access to native API’s.
What’s Native Mobile App?
The smartphone applications that are built for a specific operating system and coded in a specific programming language like Java for Android, Swift or Objective C for iOS, C# for Windows Phone are native mobile applications. This not only increases the performance of the application but as well increases the high degree of reliability.
Benefits and Features of Native Apps
- Native mobile applications are fast and responsive
- They can easily adapt to devise functionality making use of camera, compass, microphone, maps, swipe gestures and accelerometer
- They make use of push notifications and help in alerting users when they are required to take some action
- Native applications take care of UI/UX more effectively for a better user-friendly application
Drawbacks of Native apps
Major minus points with native app:
- These make use of more than one codebase. Android applications cannot run on iPhones and vice-versa
- Native applications are expensive and take longer to be built
Examples of Native Apps
Pokemon Go, Twitter, and Waze are examples of fully native apps.
What is a Hybrid Mobile App?
We have hybrid mobile applications that could eventually shift gears from monitoring to letting things go a bit more. Truly liberalizing – a mobile app developer does not have to think about developing for a particular platform – the giving up of control and making business rules simpler, consistent and interference-free can easily bump up the app creation process.
Hybrid applications can be taken into consideration when a single platform is to be used to build an application. Hybrid applications are built with JavaScript, CSS, and HTML and are developed in Webview which is a simplified browser within the app.
- Xamarin and React native are two such platforms that provide cross-platform app development. These are used to build an app that can work across platforms. Hybrid app development tools are available to construct, distribute, test and learn from the apps.
- Xamarin can be considered a more complete development environment as compared to PhoneGap and Titanium where you developed app can be tested on thousands of virtual devices before launching it. Cross-OS and cross-devices testing are important to ascertain the endurance of the app. Examples of companies that have made use of Xamarin to build their hybrid apps – Pinterest, Slack, and Honeywell etc.
- React Native apps, on the other hand, look and behave like native apps but they are simultaneous cannot be called as mobile web apps op HTML5 apps. The trick is that they have to put JavaScript and React together and build an app in Objective C or Java.
- React Native capers with the idea of accessing device’ functionality and weave native code into it. Some of the examples of React Native include Facebook, Airbnb, Tesla, Walmart etc.
- Titanium works in the same way as React Native and tries to bridge native API’s to JavaScript with its own set of API’s.
How must a decision to build a native or a hybrid app be taken?
If you have an app idea and are not sure whether people will like it or not then the foremost thing that must be considered is to place something that is relevant to them, with limited resources. To provide the simplest version of a usable product that can be valuable to them (a minimum viable product) must be the primary objective.
- Having an app idea is easy and converting that idea into a working app can be made possible with some efforts, but that does not essentially determine whether people will download it or not.
- A lot of factors impel us to re-look into our decision and twist our discretion towards hybrid apps. These are:
- It works on the principle of write once, and use anywhere. There is just one codebase to manage.
- A lot of time and money can be saved if the effort of writing code on multiple platforms is not required. In addition to this, a hybrid app takes 50% less time to be deployed than a usual native counterpart.
- Once a hybrid application is written, it can be written for another mobile platform easily as it promotes scalability.
Although they conk out on performance sometimes, hybrid applications still retain the ability to access device features. This is one of the biggest advantages of hybrid applications that sets them apart from native apps. Solutions like PhoneGap/Cordova bridge the gap between native SDK and webview in which the app runs.
Hybrid vs native app – Which one will you pick for your next development project?
The choice to build a hybrid or native app depends upon a number of competing features and there is no single definitive answer to selecting a particular app type Native Vs. Hybrid for your next developmental process.
It is easy to create Native Apps for Android and iOS smartphones but if one tries to interchange the developmental efforts and tries to create android code for iPhones and vice-versa, it is practically not possible.
A web application is simply an application created in any environment and accessed in browsers via a network such as an internet. But there are some points that make it potentially different from a website. While a website will just provide some information, a web app will be more interactive. Example of the website is Wikipedia while Facebook is a web app. Web apps don’t need to be downloaded.
While a developer tries to build an application that is dedicated for a single purpose, they encounter with a sprawl of questions. Here is a gist:
Can you convert a web app into a hybrid app?
No, it is not possible to convert a web app into a hybrid app.
How to make a Web or Hybrid App feel Native?
Making use of splash screens, adding back button to UI, following style guides, getting rid of 300 ms delays, and making wait time seem longer are some quirky tips that web developers consider while they build hybrid apps.
Cogitated Summary
If the user wants to bet upon the performance, then definitely native apps are the option. But comparing other major features like cross-platform compatibility, coding time, efforts, cost and time to market – hybrid applications emerge out as the winner. Boo-yah! Have a look at our portfolio and you’ll find the golden ticket to your dream project. Consociate with us for your Hybrid vs Native needs!