Mobile applications have become an integral part of businesses these days. They have become the major revenue generators for any business. Owing to the increased usage of smartphones, customers these days prefer to transact on the phones. As such to cater to the rising demand of mobile apps, there has been a surge in the number of mobile app development companies.
If you are looking for mobile application development for your company, you might have caught up in the dilemma of choosing between web app, native app or a hybrid app. In this article, we would like to offer a comprehensive detail of types of mobile applications and helps you choose the right one that deems fit for your needs.
While Native applications offer full performance and speed, the hybrid applications offer advantages in aspects such as reduced time, efforts and scalability. Before you proceed further, let’s have a basic understanding of both the native and hybrid mobile applications.
Native mobile apps
A native app development involves the creation of an application suited only to a single platform, either Android, iOS and Windows. The reliability and performance of the native apps are always on the higher side when compared to hybrid apps. The native app development ensures that OS preferences are integrated within the application framework and are also instrumental in offering a personalized digital experience. The developers employ only a single programming language for making native apps. In the case of Android, the apps are made using programming languages such as Java, Android, and iOS, a programming language such as Swift and Objective C are used. Native apps generally have better performance with rendering and animations as compared to Hybrid apps.
Pros of Native apps
- A native app can access all device and OS features.
- The applications are fast and responsive.
- Native apps keep design at a high level and deliver a great experience to all the users of the product.
- Native app
- development is the only way of adjusting the layout for different screen sizes of all the android devices available in the market.
- Native apps can use inbuilt security features of the operating system and ensures users reliable data protection.
- The performance of the apps is higher and also they load much faster.
- Easily adapt to device functionality and makes use of microphone, camera, compass, accelerometer, and swipe gestures.
- Alerts users through push notifications, when they wanted to take action.
- Offers better user experience; flow appears natural, as they have specific UI standards for each platform.
Cons of Native apps
- The developed app is not compatible with other platforms. For instance, Android applications cannot be run on iOS and so on.
- The apps are expensive and consume a long time for building and development.
- Requires qualified staff for development and hence it is associated with the greater investment.
- It is not the best option for simple apps.
- The security of native apps can be breached by insecure local data storage, data leakages and poor implementation of the SSL.
Hybrid mobile app
Hybrid apps are an amalgamation of both native and web apps. Hybrid apps work well across multiple devices and platforms. The apps do not require separate coding language for each platform. Hybrid apps are built using HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
Xamarin and Reactive Native offer cross-platform app development. Among them, Xamarin offers a more complete development environment and the app can be tested thousands of times on virtual devices before the actual launch. On the other side, the react native is developed by Facebook and enables developers to use react along with native platform using Javascript. The apps are supportable on both Android and iOS platform.
Pros of hybrid mobile apps
- Presence of a single code base makes the maintenance of the business easier.
- The apps are also less expensive to make when compared to native apps.
- Hybrid apps can achieve the same hardware-based performance acceleration similar to native apps.
- Hybrid apps have the same and consistent user experience across platforms.
Cons of hybrid mobile apps
Apart from the pros, hybrid app development has some cons associated with it.
- Need to invest additional efforts in building separate shells for separate platforms.
- The apps are slightly slower when compared with native apps.
- When it comes to user experience, the hybrid apps appear to be inferior compared to the native apps.
- Debugging is also a bigger affair; the developer needs to rely on the frameworks to work nicely with the operating system.
Native vs Hybrid mobile app: The ideal type of mobile application to choose for your next development project
There used to be days when app developers solely used to stick to SDKs offered by Google and Apple for mobile application development. Now, there are several available alternatives in the form of hybrid apps that offers similar user experience and also access to native APIs. Now the question arises! Which is the ideal mobile application platform for your business? The answer to the question lies in the expectations on the app and the users. Apart, there are other factors that you needed to focus on such as budget, the number of developers, one platform or multiple platforms, apps core functionality, level of speed and performance and the likes. Further, the cost of the app development depends on business needs, developer skill, timelines, and app requirements.
Considering all the above-mentioned possibilities, it is not an exaggeration to pick the native app for your dream project. In cases of Graphical applications, HD Games and Intensive animation applications, native apps perform well, because native code is faster than HTML and javascript. Now, it is clear that each and every app has its set of pros and cons, do your own research before proceeding with the app development for your business.
Collection of mobile app icons
