Mobile applications are now what consumer software was in the early 90s and what websites were in the 1st decade of the 21st century. Every company has a mobile application out there; well, almost every company. And though some mobile applications directly impact a business by generating leads and enabling sales like apps that facilitate ticket booking or the ones which support ecommerce, there are other kinds of apps that help increase brand awareness.
So whether you are selling tickets to your motivational seminar (event application), want to sell your real estate (property listing apps with virtual tour) or want to connect local businesses with end customers (service listing app) there is an app for all your business need. And if you are considering whether or not to invest in a mobile application, here is one important piece of information which you should consider – YOUR COMPETITION ALREADY HAS A MOBILE APPLICATION OUT IN THE MARKET AND PEOPLE ARE USING AND LOVING IT.
Now that we both know you should be more proactive in your decision to get started with your mobile application, here comes the million-dollar question – whether to go forward with Native apps or Hybrid apps?
Which platform to choose will depend specifically on two things (in that priority) – the requirements of your application (every function that your app is supposed to perform) and your budget (no surprise there).
However, making up your mind as to which platform to go forward with can sometimes be as testing as choosing between which of two women you want to marry (or men, for that matter), both of whom you happen to like quite the same. Though a simple Google will flood you with ideas and suggestions, intended to solve your dilemma, it which may actually end up confusing you even more. Here is rather an article which talks about something more important – the myth surrounding this eternal battle.
Fact: Hybrid costs approximately 30% – 40% lesser than native.
This popular myth owes its existence to some early age consultants and sales experts, who wanted their clients to see the stark difference between hybrid and native platforms, in terms of cost, and thereby beguile their customers to choose hybrid platforms. But this sleazy trick has suffered a rather painful death in today’s world when customers buy a solution and not promises. The hybrid platform allows the app to be developed in a single platform but then it has to be configured for both the platforms separately. The team also has to test the application after it has been developed in both android and iOS environment and solve any issue and test it again in both environments. This effectively sees a reduction of the effort of only about 30%-40% depending on the feature density of the app. A reduction in cost is always equivalent to the reduction of effort. So a hybrid app, for both OS platforms, costs effectively 30% to 40% lesser (and not 50% lesser) as compared to the total price of building the applications in native platform.
Fact: Hybrid takes slightly more time to build than native
A native application is built on separate platforms for iOS and Android. Two separate development teams work in parallel to develop the app. In a hybrid environment, one team develops the app and then configures it for both the platform. Since one team works for the hybrid model as compared to two teams, the development time for the hybrid is slightly more than that for native.
Fact: Hybrid app can be just as safe as native apps
When it comes to the safety and security of the data that your app uses, what constitutes a good secure application is not the platform on which it is built but the security measures considered by the developers. A good team of hybrid developers will use all the basic safety guidelines that a team of native developers will use – passwords should be encrypted while stored in the device, HTTP requests should be made over SSL and Javascript should be obfuscated to make it illegible to anyone spoofing on the data.
Fact: Hybrid apps perform as good as Native for most cases
The performance of a mobile application depends on other things as well and not just it’s built. The physical capability of a device and the version of the OS (which also means the version of the browser) goes a long way to determine the performance of a mobile application. In the nascent days of hybrid development, because of the considerably poorer configuration of device hardware and OS, hybrid apps did perform relatively slower than its native counterpart. But with advances in the devices and the OS, most hybrid and native applications will work at par on two devices of similar or identical configuration.
It is important to note however those applications which are power-hungry like gaming applications (with high graphics and FPS) are better built-in native rather than a hybrid.
Fact: Apart from resource-hungry or resource-intense applications, all other applications can be built with the hybrid.
Explanation: Since native by definition uses the same platform as the device OS, so apps built-in native can control core features of the device more seamlessly than a hybrid app, for example – device camera, GPS, call, WiFi, etc. For a long time, hybrid applications did suffer from the limitation of not being able to build every conceivable feature. But as the platform evolves, it keeps solving most of its problems. In its current state, a hybrid application can incorporate almost all features that a native application can. Even in case of some challenges, there are a lot of good Cordova plugins available which will help the developers to easily mitigate any problem. However, hybrid applications are still struggling to make room for resource-hungry applications. So for the time being, applications which are predicted to be resource hungry, are better built-in native platform.
The value of a good consultation company lies not in telling you which platform to choose over the other. The value lies in understanding your requirement and analyze the future application from a technical viewpoint and then suggest you accordingly.
If you are in the decisive stage for building your mobile applications and have questions which you need some suggestions to, I would be happy to schedule 15 minutes to call with you too –
Keep an eye on this space as I debunk more myths surrounding the IT Service Industry and help you make the right choices.
