Native v/s Hybrid Mobile App Development
Every business needs Mobile Apps to inform their customers and leads about the products or services they offer and to offer present customers timely assistance through their Mobile Apps. A Mobile App also serves as a powerful marketing tool helping a business maintain its competitive advantage in an ever expanding market.
If your organization is not in the business of Mobile Apps development and programming, you are more likely to hire a vendor for your Mobile App needs while you focus on your core competencies. The key question facing small and often medium sized businesses is whether you go for Native Mobile Apps or Hybrid Mobile App.
Mobile Apps development is constantly moving at a tremendous pace. Every six months, there’s a new mobile operating system, with unique features only accessible with native APIs. The containers bring those to hybrid apps soon thereafter, with the web making leaps every year. So, it is very difficult to a business entrepreneur to make decision – either they choose the Native Mobile Apps or Hybrid Mobile App.
Native Mobile App Development
A native app is a Smartphone application developed specifically for a mobile operating system (Objective-C or Swift for iOS and Java for Android). Since the app is developed within a mature ecosystem following the technical and user experience guidelines of the OS (e.g. swipes, app defined gestures, left aligned header on Android, centrally aligned header on iOS, etcetera), it not only has the advantage of faster performance but also “feels right”.
Benefits of Native Mobile Apps:
- Native apps are designed for a specific operating system. As a company embarks on the task to build a new app, the user experience specific for that OS become of critical importance to the mobile presence on the market.
- A robust user experience must address the adaptability and layout, navigation, modal structure, interactivity and feedback, animation, color and typography, and in-app branding.
- Native applications have the best performance, highest security, and best user experience.
Hybrid Mobile apps are, at core, website packaged into a native wrapper. They look and feel like a native app, but ultimately outside of the basic frame of the application typically restricted to the controls/navigational elements.
Hybrid app is a web app built using HTML5 and JavaScript, wrapped in a native container which loads most of the information on the page as the user navigates through the application.
Benefits of Hybrid Mobile App:
- When launching a hybrid application, that app is platform agnostic. That’s one of the main appeals of a hybrid app: you build it once and then you release it across multiple platforms.
- One UI – nice and simple that is accessible on every platform. Additionally, you do not have to maintain two different code bases.
- Hybrid apps are easier to build, take less time to market and maintain one code base.
A quick guideline for choosing a Native Mobile App or Hybrid Mobile App for your business:
App Features
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Native Mobile App
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Hybrid Mobile App
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Graphics
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Native APIs - The native platform gives you the fastest graphics, which is not a big deal if you are showing a static screen with only a few elements, but a very big deal if you are using a lot of data and require a fast refresh.
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HTML, Canvas, SVG – If you want the “Native feel,” but it’s not possible. Scrolling, fixed headers and transitions have been an issue so better doesn’t use Hybrid App for Animation or Graphic-intensive Applications.
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User Experience
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Native - Native apps provide the best user experience because they are specifically designed for a single app store with which one can get the best compatible apps. The screen size is taken care of and so are the hardware capabilities.
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Emulated – Hybrid App is having one code base distributed on multiple platforms. With the Hybrid apps, it is impossible to provide a good experience with just one app for all platforms.
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Development skills
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A native app is a Smartphone application developed specifically for a mobile operating system (Objective-C or Swift for iOS and Java for Android).
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Hybrid app is a web app built using HTML5,CSS and JavaScript, wrapped in a native container like PhoneGap.
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Development Cost & Timeline
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Native Apps are coded in different platform and requires multiple skills set so it takes more time and ultimately dearer than developing the Hybrid Apps.
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Hybrid Apps take less time to develop the application so the cost to develop the application is definitely cheaper than developing the Native Apps.
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Performance
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Fast - Native apps download most of the content when the user first installs the app.
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Slow - Hybrid app is a web app built using HTML5 and JavaScript, wrapped in a native container which loads most of the information on the page as the user navigates through the application.
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Offline storage
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Secure file storage
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Secure file system, shared SQL
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Connectivity
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Online and offline
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Online and offline - A hybrid app uses a browser view and hooks to allow your web app to access features on your mobile device like Contacts, Push Notifications or Offline Data Storage.
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Distribution
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Appstore
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Appstore
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Very Nice Article, Thank you
ReplyDeleteGood one, thanks
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