If you are planning to provide a unique mobile experience to your users, then you should choose the right harvesting ground for successful results. It is crucial to understand which mobile app development platform will lead to a better customer experience for your users.
Many people, especially new developers, get confused and face a myriad of questions like:
Should I choose hybrid mobile app development or should I go with native apps or should I invest in cross-platform app development? Which one will be the optimal choice for my business?
If you too are surrounded by these questions, then this article is for you.
Today, mobile applications have grown very rapidly and have invaded every sphere of our life. In fact it is estimated that in 2020, consumers spend more than 25% of their time on mobile apps, generating revenue of $50 billion in the first half of the year. From shopping and entertainment to education, shelter-in-place orders have impacted the use of mobile apps during COVID-19 lockdowns.
Regardless of the industry you are in, mobile applications provide a platform where regular interaction with your target customer can foster trust and loyalty. Mobile apps are considered an effective strategy to get ahead of your competitors by reaching out to every segment of customers.
Thus, it becomes necessary for us to think critically about which mobile app development approach would provide more growth and accessibility.
But due to lack of enough end-to-end resources and inability to understand the nature of business, many developers and businesses fail to choose the right mobile app development approach, resulting in an unproductive software product and poor user experience.
Therefore, choosing the right platform for mobile application development is essential, and it depends on many factors such as app features, competition, budget targets, nature of business, target consumers, traffic, and scale of operations.
The debate between Hybrid apps vs. Native apps vs. Cross-Platform ways of developing mobile applications still continues, with no clear winner. But here in this post, we aim to help you make a smart, informed decision on which technology you should use to build your app.
How to choose an approach to build a Mobile App
Customer Preference – Android/iOS or both?
Today, about 60% (around 4.72 billion) of the total population of the world are Internet users, of which around 92.8% use mobile devices to access the internet.
Out of these mobile users, 72.2% are Android, 26.99% are iOS users and the remaining 1% stick to Windows Mobile, Tizen and KaiOS. Both Android and Apple markets are increasingly moving towards a central platform for a broader digital experience, and you, as an entrepreneur, want to create a high-performance, user-friendly and cost-effective application to get the most out of your app.
It has become important to find out where your potential audience is living, what their needs, wants and preferences are. Furthermore, from the above facts, it is clear that most people use Android phones. But if you are living in a country like America or Europe, then people usually choose Apple devices here. So, it all depends on the region. Developing an application by considering your target audience will definitely benefit your business. Sometimes, to amaze and entice users, you need a multi-platform app that can integrate into both the platforms (Android and iOS). There is such a difficult choice to make, but thankfully, we have technologies that can solve your problems.
Time and Budget
Another important point to be kept in mind is the amount of time and money you will spend on your project. For example when you need to release a project at a lower cost in less time and effort, developing a cross-platform framework would be an ideal option. Cross-platform Flutter is Google’s open source technology that enables you to quickly create a mobile app that will work on major mobile operating systems (Android and iOS).
Type of Applications
When selecting a technique for application development, it is important to consider the type of application. For example if your project requires an e-commerce app, then the developer will create an app using a hybrid framework. Since hybrid apps are based on web technology, they are easier to maintain and take less time.
To make your app function smoothly on any device on a wide iOS and Android Spectrum with cost-effective and high performance capability, you need to follow a strategic approach. This approach will let you understand and analyze the development of Native, Hybrid and Cross-Platform apps in terms of cost, performance, capacity and usability.
A quick overview through hybrid apps vs native apps
Native App Development
The app developed exclusively on a specific technology dedicated to either the Android or IOS platform using a native-to-the-operating-system language is a Native App. Hence, for building android mobile app Java or Kotlin is used and for iOS, Objective-C or Swift is used. Users love native apps for high performance as the application is tailor-made to run on both the platforms.
Hybrid App Development
Hybrid mobile app development combines the features of a native app and a web app to quickly create a product available on different platforms using well-known languages like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. These hybrid apps consist of backend codes using standard web technologies which developers embed into the native app using plugins like Apache Cordova or Ionic’s Capacitor, which further allow developers to access the native features of platforms.
Cross-Platform App Development
The only similarity between hybrid and cross-platform apps is its code shareability. All the rest, they differ in providing a great user experience with different UI. Cross-platform development approach provides the close-to-native UX as they are using native rendering engines. Now, building cross-platform apps have become faster and cost-efficient, thanks to frameworks like Flutter and React Native.
According to Google Trends, React Native is the most popular cross-platform mobile framework used by global developers in 2020.
Comparative study
| App type | Native | Hybrid | Cross-platform |
| Pros | Superior runtime optimizations Faster performance Easier to prevent bugs Fully access to device/OS’s features Wider access to APIs Higher-quality functionality and UX | Leverages both native libraries & web technologies Time savior and cost-effective easier to maintain Reachability to the audience is faster Developers are cheap Easy to use device feature like Camera or GPS | Different OS support UI performance is almost as fast as native Time saviour due to code reusability Cost-effective development Secure, stable and seamless integration |
| Rendering engine | Native | Browser | Native |
| Cons | No multi-platform support High dev costs if different OS support is needed No reusable code Need more effort and time | Sluggish performance Limited access to OS features No interaction with other native apps Impossible to access offline as they are web based Challenge to achieve great UX | Slower performance Limited access to OS features(however, not as limited as for hybrid) Complex development features Poor interaction with other native apps Complicate coding of HTML5 |
| Examples | Artsy | JustWatch NHS Airbus Helicopters | Bloomberg Insightly Reflectly |
| Tools | XCode AppCode Android Studio | Ionic Apache Cordova Visual Studio | React Native Xamarin Flutter |
After looking through each approach in detail, you are still in confusion as to which development method your business should adopt. Now let’s come to our million-dollar question: Which development methodology is best for you? And how?
After so much searching and analysis, we have come up with some key pillars that can help you identify which approach will provide the best ROI to your business.
Performance
To provide a greater user experience, performance is a major priority. And in the battle of performance, the native apps are very fast and responsive. In the Native approach, the app delivers an extremely high level of performance and includes Access USB input, complex networking, memory management, and more. Loading time is also less in native app as content and visual elements are stored in the user’s phone as users navigate through the native mobile app.
However in Hybrid and cross-platform application development it is difficult to optimize single-codebase apps for proper work on different mobile platforms, thus making the app slower. Also, Hybrid and cross-platform apps face restrictions or limitations in exploring the full power of Smartphones such as face id, gestures, accelerometer and more.
Budget
If you are a small business or startup, making all the decisions such as cost of development, time, effort, reusability of resources becomes the top priority when making IT investment decisions.
As we already discussed, if you are out of budget, cross-platform app development would be an ideal option as it allows developers to reuse code for multiple platforms. But if you have enough time and budget and your company is going to launch the app for the first time, then going with native app will definitely give you a good customer reach.
Development Tools and Library Support
Today developers are flexible in their choice as there are several options available below to build apps in any of these development principles.
- Some of the most popular hybrid mobile frameworks include Ionic and NativeScript that help developers build apps faster.
- For seamless app development, Cross-Platform has popular tools like React Native (an open-source React-based framework), Flutter (an open-source UI toolkit) and Xamarin (an open-source .Net based framework).
- To incorporate features and capabilities, Native apps don’t rely on open source libraries, but have popular tools like Atom, AppCode, Android IDE and Android studio to deliver groundbreaking app solutions.
However, when it comes to choosing a winner in this regard, Native apps will be the clear winner, as Native application development does not require any extensive support from libraries and frameworks to produce outstanding performance.
Security
To protect and manage the user’s personal information, it has become necessary to write secure and dynamic code for your applications. Through several features like biometric authentication, SSL encryption and more, the native app provides better reliable data security. Whereas, hybrid and cross-platform apps rely on underlying technologies such as HTML5, JavaScript and CSS that are more vulnerable to malware, Phishing and other threats.
This is why many government organizations and financial institutions rely more on Native app development than hybrid and cross-platform app development.
User Experience and Functionality
In terms of functionality, user experience, customization and personalization, no one can be more perfect than Native app development. Native apps take full advantage of its OS features such as fingerprint authentication, camera, scrolling, microphone, navigations, etc., which ultimately gives better user experience. Push notifications add another star to native app development’s functionality.
It’s not Hybrid’s cup of tea to fully take advantage of its UI capabilities. However, cross-platform can deliver up to 90-95% of the same performance using React Native or Flutter, but still its performance depends on the native codes used in the Smartphones.
Summing Up
After combat, it is crystal clear that the Native development approach is the king of app development and has an extra edge over hybrid and cross platform versions. In addition, it has covered all five pillars that every mobile app of today needs to focus on.
For example, in its early days Airbnb began its journey with React Native. They choose the cross-platform method to move faster as an organization and manage the codebase easier with fewer employees. But two years later, they shifted their focus to a high-performance and better development experience. So, now they’re putting all their efforts towards native apps. This transition makes us learn that with increasing demands and objectives, you will definitely have to evolve with it. At the beginning of the journey, Airbnb was making a profit with React Native, but the increasing market demands prompted them to go native.
Each approach has its pros and cons but an ambitious startup can also benefit from building a hybrid or cross-platform app as a pilot solution. High development speed, one source code, cross-compatible, time-efficient, web technologies, availability of resources, and lower (initial!) budget costs make hybrid and cross-platform approaches very appealing.
However, if you are still unsure which type of app development approach would be ideal for your business, get in touch with our experts at Kilowott. Our experts will guide you in finding a suitable approach that cuts down the competitive research time and the development costs to a great extent.
