What You Need to Know About Hybrid Mobile App Development

Operating a website or business in today’s world requires a mobile app at least as a companion tool as the number of smartphone users is sharply increasing. A decade back, many of the business and websites used to develop their mobile applications as an in-house development process. Today with increasing smartphone penetration, many mobile app development companies provide specialized services. With these background stories, today is important to know various practical matters about the mobile app development process for a business plan.

What are Hybrid Mobile Apps?

There are mainly three types of mobile applications – Native Mobile Applications, Hybrid Mobile Applications and Web-based Mobile Applications. Web-based Mobile Apps require an active internet connection for user engagement. These apps are not capable to run without online connectivity. Both the Native Mobile Applications and Hybrid Mobile Applications do not have this limitation.

Native mobile applications are built with the tools usually provided by the platform vendor. So the development process demands knowing in-depth about the platform SDK, tools and language. Some of the examples can be Xcode/Objective-C for iOS, Eclipse/Java for Android, Visual Studio/C# for Windows Phone. Hybrid mobile apps are applications that are installed on a device, just like any native mobile applications. Hybrid mobile apps possess the skeleton elements same as the native mobile apps. Hence, in reality, these applications are developed for a specific platform such as iOS or Android. But their difference is in the core function of the app. They have elements from web apps, websites designed to act like apps. Hybrid mobile apps are deployed in a local/native container and use the device’s browser engine to render HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

So in the case of Hybrid Mobile App and Web-based Mobile App, we are dependent on the web technologies such as CSS, JavaScript, HTML/HTML5. Web-based Mobile Apps are not real mobile applications and generally they are not favoured.

What are the Advantages of Hybrid Apps?

Hybrid apps combine the best of both Native Mobile Applications and Web-based Mobile Applications. Some of their advantages are obvious :

1. Hybrid apps are built with web technologies which means there are many web developers who already have the skills to create mobile applications and perform a regular maintenance.
2. Hybrid Apps can be developed with an agile development cycle.
3. One attractive part of the Hybrid Apps is controlled costs – they are cost-effective or cheaper than developing the Native Mobile Applications.
4. Their core part can operate on different mobile platforms.
5. They have a faster build times.
6. It is easier to optimize JavaScript and push modern CSS frameworks to create beautiful layouts.
7. Easier to launch patches, updates and does not need users’ action for update.
8. Easier to scale.

What are the Limitations of Hybrid Apps?

The Hybrid Apps are written with the same technology used for websites. They use web view control to display HTML and JavaScript files using the native browser rendering engine (Webkit is a browser rendering engine that is used on iOS, and Android). The Hybrid Apps uses an abstraction layer to exposes the device capabilities plus there is JavaScript API. The web-to-native abstraction layer allows access to the accelerometer, camera, and local storage. This methodology invites certain limitations :

1. Hybrid Apps development is not practical for the apps with graphics intense usage.
2. Slower performance when compared to the Native Apps
3. The UI can not be designed to deliver the feel of the Native Apps
4. They can not use the platforms’ capacities in full
5. The need to test the app on a range of devices

These limitations make the development of platform-specific tools, advanced games next to impossible.

How to Choose the Right Kind of App?

Postindustria has mentioned some points useful to any hybrid app developer. Before deciding to select a reputed development service for its hybrid app, the client company should think about a certain number of factors to bring the expected business benefits :

1. What are the existing development resources? An article publication website, for example, can easily choose the Hybrid App Development process.
2. Will we update it frequently? Hybrid Apps are more suitable for frequent updates of the backend.
3. What are the functionalities that we wish for? As explained above, we can not expect all the devices’ native functionalities that the Native Apps can offer.
4. Do we want to add Mobile Ads? Many of the Hybrid Mobile App development companies offer mobile ad optimization service as this kind of app development often the choice of the websites which offers a free or freemium service.

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What is the Conclusion?

When the goal is to publish some usable professional looking mobile app while being short on resources, we need an easier cheaper mobile app (this is called an MVP – minimum viable product). Hybrid Mobile App development is a solution to this situation. The Native Apps costs a huge to develop when compared to the hybrid apps. Hybrid apps live in an app store like the native mobile apps and can take advantage of the many device features available at a cheaper rate. On average the hybrid app development cost should be $5000 – $1,00,000 whereas developing a native mobile app like the Twitter mobile app can cost 20 times it.

PhoneGap, Cordova, Canvas are some of the well known Hybrid App platforms. UI library like Onsen UI speeds up the development time. With React Native, the developers can build mobile app that is virtually indistinguishable from an app built using Objective-C or Java. Gradually, the number of Open Source frameworks and designing resources are increasing. Mobile app development is becoming more affordable offering some decent return on investment.