Hybrid Vs Native Mobile App Development – What to Choose?

With the recent advancements in digital technology, online presence has become a necessity for all eCommerce businesses. With the outbreak of the global pandemic, people have switched their businesses to digital mode.

By 2020, most brick-and-mortar businesses have shifted to online stores to expand their businesses. If you own an eCommerce business, you must have a mobile business app to attract more organic traffic to your online store. All eCommerce businesses rely on digital mobile apps to expand their customer base.

If you don’t own a mobile business app, you can hire a custom mobile app development company to build a mobile app for your online business ventures. In this blog, you will learn the difference between native and hybrid mobile app development and which approach is more suitable for your online business.

What Is the Difference Between Hybrid Versus Native Mobile Apps?

• Native Mobile Apps

Native mobile apps are built in a platform-specific programming language to make them congruent only with parallel platforms. Android mobile apps are primarily built in Java, whereas iOS mobile apps are built in Apple’s Swift.

• Hybrid Mobile Apps

On the contrary, hybrid mobile apps are built using web technologies such as JavaScript, CSS and HTML5 combined with native components. These are platform-independent sites shown using the native WebView, an element provided by the operating systems such as iOS and Android for loading the web content.

How to Choose Between the Native and Hybrid Mobile Apps?

There are many major differences in native and hybrid mobile app development, such as developmental cost, time, maintenance, performance, and user experience. After reading this blog, you can choose which platform is more suitable for your online business.

• Cost of Development

When it comes to the development cost of mobile apps, hybrid mobile apps have the upper hand over native mobile apps. Hybrid apps are cost-effective compared to native apps because they can be built with a single code base.

For a small enterprise, it costs around $35,000 to build an MVP using a hybrid platform, whereas it costs around $49,000 to build a native mobile app for Android and iOS. The cost of the development of native apps is too high as compared to the hybrid app, so if you are looking to develop a mobile app with a minimum viable product, then the hybrid approach is more suitable for you.

• Time

It takes less time to develop a hybrid mobile app as compared to a native mobile app. Because hybrid apps are built using web technologies such as CSS, JavaScript, and HTML5, it is much easier to create a prototype from a rough idea than the specific programming languages.

Hybrid apps are built with a single codebase to work on multiple platforms, which shortens the time to advertise. Companies that choose to develop a native mobile app end up launching their app on a single platform, alienating the users on other platforms.

• Maintenance

Users have high expectations that your mobile app will have a higher loading speed than mobile websites when it comes to mobile apps. On average, mobile users expect an app to load in two seconds, which can be achieved easily with bug fixation and regular updates.

Building a native mobile app means you need multiple codebases for your app maintenance (iOS and Android). Android app developers are not so proficient in developing iOS apps – and vice versa.

That’s why the companies that choose to build a native mobile app need to hire twice as many app developers as those companies who have selected the hybrid approach.

• Performance

Native mobile apps are developed using specific programming languages, allowing app developers to optimize their apps for maximum performance fully. In contrast, hybrid mobile apps add a layer between the source code and the target platform, which results in performance loss.

Initially, Facebook invested in hybrid apps over native. Some apps don’t require many optimizations to function on mobile devices; such applications benefit from a hybrid approach. Native apps are preferred over hybrid apps for performance; that’s why most of the games are not hybrid.

• User Experience

Most app users don’t care about the technology that has powered the app; they only care about their experience on an app. The app must be functional and congruent with platform-specific characteristics.

Hybrid apps function like native apps, but their user experience is not as polished as native apps. Frameworks offered by the hybrid apps are Xamarin, Native Script, Reactive Native, and Ionic, which are persistently getting better to offer native apps like user experience.

Conclusion

Functional mobile apps can help to take your business to the next level. Mobile apps can help to drive more conversions with their easy navigation and attractive features. If you are running an online store but don’t have a mobile app, you won’t reach out to more potential customers. A responsive mobile app gives you a competitive edge over your competitors in the digital market.