The world is going mobile. In this decade, we have seen that the increasing number of smartphone users has increased the number of mobile applications used around the globe. In Q3 2019, there were more than 2.7 million apps and 1.8 million apps were ready to be downloaded from the play store and app store, respectively (source). Our search engines are also giving mobile usage a priority for the web applications. Some businesses and startups are meant to be run on mobile apps only. For example, your online food ordering application or taxi booking application is best when you can use it on mobile as an application. But, then what is a native and hybrid application competition?

While the mobile application market is not as easy and shallow as it looks from the surface; application performance, technology, UX, CX and many more factors are the key pillars behind any mobile application’s success or failure. Serving people and making the mobile app best for your customers, the primary thing you would have to deal with is to get it developed and getting it online on mobile stores, as many as possible across OS and platforms.

Application design and development is a crucial part of getting started in the mobile application business. When you jump in the market to find suitable vendors to build your application, you would be greeted with a tonne of questions. Like what is your budget to develop the mobile application? By when you are expecting your app to go live? You need a Progressive Web App (PWA), hybrid app or a native app for a particular mobile operating system?

While you would have an answer for when to hit the market and what is your budget, the question of going native or hybrid might get you on the internet and make your search what precisely a hybrid or native application is?

 

 

Native applications:

Native mobile apps are made to run on a particular mobile platform only. When your user base is limited to certain people only, you can go ahead with this option. Objective C & Swift are used to develop iOS applications and Java & Kotlin are used for Android application development.

While native apps are cheaper to build, but, it allows you to deal with a limited amount of talent pool who are masters in those languages. Finding a fit resource for your project might become a problem.

However, native applications do have their benefits. As you are developing a mobile app targeting just one mobile platform, you would be able to maximize the performance and efficiency of the application. Native applications are capable of performing well offline.

Hybrid applications:

Unlike native apps, hybrid apps are developed with common web languages like HTML, CSS and JavaScript. They are then wrapped in native codes to meet mobile operating systems and platforms. As with only one code base is used to develop an application that would run on both major iOS and Android platforms, investment in time reduces. Also, for common development language, you would meet a large talent pool, which would be not only less expensive, you would have the choice to get the best resource or project company on board.

React Native and Ionic are popular hybrid application development frameworks. While hybrid application development gives you the flexibility to get more done in less time, it comes with a drawback. While using third party or community-driven plugins in your application code, you might encounter bugs in application affecting your application’s performance.

Here is the direct comparison between native and hybrid mobile application:

 

 

Hybrid apps are better if our business relies on mobile applications only. While a single code base would help you get the app developed faster, you would get time to market it better. Talk to our experts to build your net mobile application.