Should you develop your mobile app for Android, iOS or both? This is the million-dollar question faced by businesses across the globe when they decide to invest in a mobile app. Unfortunately, this is not the right questions to ask. The technology used to develop mobile apps and the mobile platforms (Android, iOS) themselves have come a long way since the early days of iPhone 3. Today it is possible to develop a mobile app once and making it run across multiple mobile platforms. This is called the Hybrid/HTML5 approach to mobile app development.
So, what is a Hybrid mobile app? Definition: ‘A mobile app that is developed once but can run on multiple mobile platforms (Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, etc.) is called a Hybrid app’.
So how does a Hybrid app work and how is it different when compared to native mobile app? Well, the secret here is the technology used to develop a hybrid mobile app i.e. web technology. Web technology (HTML5, CSS, JavaScript) is the same technology used to develop popular (responsive, mobile friendly) websites and web apps and all modern mobile platforms support these technologies out-of-the-box. This means that a hybrid mobile app, developed using the correct set of web technologies will work across multiple mobile platforms.
This approach of developing once and being able to run the mobile app across multiple platforms not only helps to save initial development costs but also ensures support and maintenance costs are kept to a minimum.
As with everything, there are advantages and disadvantages in taking the hybrid approach:
Advantages
• Lower investment: Develop once and run anywhere saves time and money otherwise required to develop multiple versions of the same mobile app.
• Faster time to market: Hybrid apps developed using web technologies generally take less time to develop when compared with native apps.
• Lower maintenance: Instead of maintaining several versions of the same mobile app, hybrid approach allows the business to maintain only one version, lowering the maintenance costs significantly.
Disadvantages
• Supported features: Because the hybrid app relies upon the web technologies supported by the mobile platforms, some of the features and functions supported are limited when compared with developing native mobile apps.
• Testing: Because of minor differences in how various mobile platforms support web technologies, hybrid apps developers need to invest a little bit of extra effort to ensure end users get a consistent user experience across all devices and mobile platforms.
• Performance: Performance of hybrid app can sometimes be slower as they do not have direct access to the underlying mobile operating systems.
• Storage: Local storage options are limited when competed with native apps.
Schnell Solutions is an award winning mobile app development company. Our dedicated team of mobile developers have developed several hybrid and native mobile applications for our clients across several verticals. If you are looking to develop a mobile app, we would be happy to provide a no-obligation quote.