While developing a mobile app, one of the important decisions you need to take is whether it should be a web app, native app or the hybrid app. Every app has got its pros and cons both, so which one is perfect for you is all that matters. You decide while keeping various factors in mind like timeline, budget, future maintenance, user experience, and the skills of your developer.
Since hybrid mobile apps fall in the range of web apps and native apps, these share some properties for both which gives this approach a few benefits. Mobile development is an ever-changing industry and this is improving continuously which makes it a popular option ever. This article shares a few merits and demerits of hybrid apps while paying a look at some technologies that are used to develop them.
A hybrid app is, more importantly, a web app, but this is given a lightweight native app container that offers it to have definite native platform features and hardware device (for instance: calendar, a device’s camera, spread and pinch functionality and push notifications) which cannot be accessed by the web application. HTML5, CSS, and Javascript are some of the frequently used front-end development technologies or the languages which gives it cross-platform functionality.
Hybrid apps are available through the app store, can easily approach the hardware on your phone, and are installed on the device the way a native app is installed. But the question that strikes our minds is what the advantages of a hybrid app are?
With an introduction above, it is the time to take a closer look at the advantages and disadvantages of hybrid apps. Here you will not see every single aspect of the hybrid app rather we focus here chiefly on its advantage over the native or web applications.
Advantages of Hybrid Apps
Advantage 1: Rapid Deployment
Hybrid apps have a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) approach that calls for the rapid deployment of functional solutions so that these could be the first to break in the market and have a competitive advantage. Those who seek to have their app in the play store or the app store quickly; it is an advice for them to use hybrid applications.
Advantage 2: Unified Deployment
So far the single biggest advantage that hybrid mobile apps offer is unified exploitation. Companies can literally save a considerable amount of money that could be otherwise spent on maintaining or separating code basis for various mobile platforms. They can actually develop a single version and let the hybrid framework of choice perform heavy lifting while making sure that everything will work extraordinarily.
With this, you need to invest low amounts on the development and have greater revenue on the other end. There may be many small businesses that are actually unable to target all the chief mobile platforms if there wasn’t the choice to do so with the hybrid framework.
Advantage 3: Offline Assistance
Web applications are critically restricted by the deficiency of offline support. This may seem to be an unimportant issue for the ones who reside in urban areas or the places where internet access is ever-present, but on the other hand, the potential consumers may get frustrated due to poor access to the applications. And as per studies, very less number of people gives a second try to the app, once they have uninstalled it. In fact, local storage can radically improve the overall user experience while storing the personal information and preferences for after use.
Now that we know the advantages of the hybrid apps, it would be unfair to not be concerned about the disadvantages of hybrid application and paint such a not viable picture that refuses to tell the whole story. There is no ignorance of the fact that just like hybrid apps assist small and medium-sized businesses to reach a wide range of audience, they also restrict in some critical ways.
Advantages of Hybrid Apps
Disadvantage 1: Performance
Hybrid apps do add an extra layer between different source codes and the target mobile platforms: specific hybrid mobile frameworks like Cordova, Ionic, Kendo, Onsen and many others. Here the unpredictable result is the expected failure of performance. It literally differs from application to application just like the noticeable difference can be, but the truth that Facebook migrated its mobile application to the native shows form HTML5 that there is definitely some major difference for such large-scale applications at least.
Disadvantage 2: Features
iPhones were released just in 2007 and it is such a long journey since then. The mobile industry is not slowing down from any aspect since that date. Mobile operating systems are in fact evolving at a much faster pace than the desktop counterparts. The reason behind is this that smartphones and tablets are now used as primary computing devices nowadays.
With hybrid frameworks, companies that wish to stand at the very apex of progress and bring in use the greatest features and hardware are likely going to experience the difficulties in achieving the set goals. It may take a bit of time before new features are implemented by the providers of these frameworks.
Disadvantage 3: Debugging
An extra layer of debugging make this hybrid framework a nightmare. Developers feel an urge to be dependent on these frameworks itself so as to play perfectly with the targeted operating system and not come up with any new bugs. Since developers are not supposed to have a very deep knowledge of the targeted platform, this can prove to be a lengthy affair.
Conclusion
Hybrid mobile applications have got their own place in almost every situation where quick development is the chief priority. Big companies or the businesses like Facebook would not prefer compromising on the performance and control. However, this may be just a matter of the time before hybrid application frameworks attain such a good level of maturity that all before mentioned negatives will clearly fade away.
Author Bio –
Vatandeep is a writing coach and blogger at Capital Web Solutions, an IT company which provides web development, designing, hosting, digital marketing and mobile application development services.
