The journey from cell phones to smartphones has been remarkable and smartphones in the present day are more than just a tool that would allow you to communicate with people and help in sending emails.
Smartphones are helping in creating opportunities that were never possible digitally. We can order food, book movie tickets, turn on or turn off the appliances in our house and do many more things with the help of a smartphone and this is all made possible through digitally created applications or well known as apps.
What are the types of mobile applications?
Smartphones have become very common and even a ten year old has a smartphone nowadays. These mobile applications have become the kingpin of innovation and every company which comes up with the idea of creating an application will look into the fact that what kind of application do they need.
Companies are facing competition like never before and they want an application which no-one else and these companies want the app to be functional in a dynamic way.
We are familiar with the common types of applications, that are android apps and ios apps. We are not going to consider the platform dependence of apps but look at the functioning of the applications. Depending on the functionality these apps are divided into native mobile apps and hybrid apps.
What is a Native Application
These native applications are some of the most common types of applications and are being developed for a very long time. These applications are programmed to work on a specific platform like iOS or android and this gives them the power to use the device-specific hardware or software. These native applications have access to all the UI controls.
These applications which are developed for a specific platform cannot be installed on other platforms. AN iOS application will not work on an android application and an android application will not work on a phone running iOS framework. The iOS apps are mainly developed using Swift or Objective-C and the android applications are developed using Java.
Since these applications are device specific they can make use of the exclusive features that the operating system offers. iOS has features like iCloud, facetime, apple music and the processing power is also high. These native apps can take the help of these features and develop applications that work closely with these applications and help in better image processing, location tracking, etc.
Advantages of Native apps –
● Native applications are efficient and reliable
● These native apps are highly customizable and the interface can be designed to offer a good user experience
● The features of the phone can back the features of the app and help in offering a variety of services
● These native applications can work in both offline and online environments
● It is easy to update the UI of these native apps to offer better functionality
Disadvantages of Native apps –
● The major disadvantage of these native apps is the diversity in code. Each device might have a different version of the application and every different version has a different code. This results in having multiple codebases.
● The application should be developed separately for android and iOS. The programming language for both the applications is also different.
● The company will have to incur a lot of expenses in developing and maintaining these applications as they have to develop a good amount of developers to get programming help and work on the applications.
What are Hybrid Applications?
As the name suggests hybrid applications are a mix of two kinds of applications. These two types of applications are web applications and native applications. The advantage of these hybrid applications is that they work as web applications and can be installed on the phone as native applications.
These hybrid apps have to be backed by the device hardware and this is made possible with the internal application program interfaces or APIs. These hybrid applications are partly web applications and this restricts the user from using these applications when there is no internet connection. The hybrid applications are powered by the servers which run the website and all the requests made within the app are sent to these servers and the processes are completed.
These hybrid applications are developed using CSS, Java, and HTML and they allow transmission of data, voice, and video without a proper tangible connection link. Hybrid applications take the help of the basic components of a phone and use these components to offer the required services.
Advantages of Hybrid apps
● These hybrid applications can access the device’s storage space and run various functions
● Hybrid applications are developed on a web basis so they occupy a lot less space and offer the required functionality. There is also a dedicated browser that helps to show dynamic online content.
● Hybrid applications are compatible with all types of devices and will function efficiently on iOS and Android devices. The UI and the framework is also compatible and is the same on all devices.
● There is no need for the developers to create different varieties of applications and they can focus on perfecting a single version of the application.
● It is easy to add new features and release updates for these apps.
● The development and the maintenance costs are low and there is no need to hire a large number of professional developers.
Disadvantages of Hybrid Applications
● Hybrid applications are backed by web servers and for these applications to work efficiently at all times, there should be an uninterrupted internet connection.
● There might be glitches or problems with the application because they are entirely dependent on plugins to access the components of the phone.
● Hybrid applications are not suitable for building really powerful applications that have great processing capabilities and functions.
Conclusion
Companies and managers often face this dilemma on which applications to develop and before choosing the type of application they have to analyze their needs. Managers should consider points like functionality, user experience, features, reliability, budget, and future plans. Depending on these factors managers can choose to go with native or hybrid application development.
The opportunities and customer experience with native and hybrid applications vary and if the kind of application you choose fits your business plan and your strategies it will be a huge success among the public.
Author bio
Zane is an industry expert who has worked with some of the top commercial and programming help firms i.e. Edumagnate and helped them with app development. It is the functionality of these applications which led to app development becoming Zane’s passion. Since a very young age, Zane has had a keen interest in software development and tried his hand at coding and since then he has been going deeper and deeper into the never-ending lines of code and is helping firms with app development.