Native vs Hybrid vs Cross-Platform — What To Choose?
With the constantly gaining enthusiasm towards the development of apps for mobile devices, there has been a myriad of questions & lots of confusion over cross-platform vs native vs hybrid app development approaches, particularly from new developers. The lack of enough end-to-end resources for choosing the right mobile app approach has continued to serve as a major barrier to finding a lasting solution for the iOS vs Android banter.
Even so, given that both platforms are critical for a fruitful mobile app strategy, cross-platform mobile app development might seem to be the best answer for this debate. Today it is no longer tenable to simply build an app that targets only one platform —Diversity is the key. We need multi-platform apps that can support both Android and iPhone smartphones and ensure no one is left out.
Native Mobile Apps
A native app is usually written in one programming language for a particular operating system. Compared to other types of products, native apps offer consistent performance and are times more reliable. Depending on the platform an app is developed for, specific programming languages are used. For iOS, it’s mainly Objective-C and Swift, while Android developers write in Java or Kotlin.
Going native is a dream of a lot of app owners, but not all can afford it. The biggest reason is, to run the app on multiple platforms, it requires developing and maintaining an app for each platform separately. And it costs a bomb to develop a Native app for multiple platforms to many business people.
Simply put, Native Apps mean building two different apps with different sets of code for each platform Android & iOS.
More Development Time equals More Development Cost.
Consider Building a Native Application If:
- Users never used your product before (as a web application, for instance)and this is the first time you are making an app public and you want to impress them with the best experience possible.
- You want to take advantage of device-specific features — camera, GPS, etc.
- The app is going to be used by a large number of people or has complex features that would be a nightmare to bugfix is a cross-platform app and impossible to load as a hybrid one
- You want to get a base of DAUs (Daily Active Users)in order to get VC investors to fund the product, so the app needs to be as intuitive and easy-to-learn as possible
Pros Of Building a Native App
High Speed
Thanks to the fact that native mobile applications don’t have a code that’s too complex, they tend to work faster than other apps. Many app elements are displayed quickly because they are preloaded beforehand.
Works Well Offline
Native apps work with no issues even when there’s no internet connectivity. Obviously, that makes such an application way more convenient to users as they can access all the features on the go or on the airplane when there’s no connection.
Cons Of Building a Native App
No reusable code
If a developer wants to create native apps both for Android and iOS, he would have to develop two separate native apps (just what we discussed). Obviously, that would take a lot more time and effort than developing one cross-platform mobile app with a reusable codebase or a hybrid app with a shared backend code.
Involves More Talent
As native apps are language-specific to the core, companies usually struggle to find a skilled developer to pull off developing a native app back-to-back. When comparing native app vs cross-platform app, if a company wants to reach out to a wider audience, they’d have to hire two development teams for native app development. Whereas it could have gone with just one in the case of cross-platform.
Native App Examples
Most of the apps smartphone users install on a daily basis are native. Here are some of the most prominent examples of what native app development is capable of.
Google Maps
Google Maps is a native app available for both Android and iOS. Both apps have common features — street view, turn-by-turn navigation, public transit information, etc. As a native app, Google Maps is able to profit from the device’s built-in features. While it does need online access to be used to its full performance, Google Maps can be displayed in an offline mode as well.
LinkedIn is another example of an application that switched from a hybrid to a native app. The quality decrease when it comes to performance, slower rendering speed, and storage space issues due to the increasing amount of daily active users forced LinkedIn to consider native apps as a development vector.
Hybrid Mobile Apps
Hybrid apps are the golden mean between native and web applications. They consist of two parts — backend code and a native viewer that can be downloaded to display the backend in a web view. Unlike web apps, hybrid mobile apps don’t require a browser for access and can take advantage of any plugin and the APIs of a device. They are cheaper in development than native apps but their performance is mostly slower as well.
Consider Building a Hybrid Application If:
- You want the app to run on different platforms but you don’t have the time to develop a cross-platform solution
- You want to make use of the device’s native features — camera, GPS, etc.
- You want to distribute a web application across application stores
Pros Of Building a Hybrid App
Faster Development
Due to the fact that the app uses the same backend code for all platforms, it doesn’t take too much time to create a hybrid app. Basically, all a developer has to do is to create a native shell to view the code that has already been developed as a web app. Keep in mind, however, that hybrid apps with lots of features can be even more time-consuming so it’s better to keep it simple.
Simple Maintenance
Due to the fact that hybrid apps are based on web technology, they are easier to maintain compared to native vs hybrid apps that is more complex in terms of coding.
Cons of Building a Hybrid App
Impossible to access Offline
Due to the fact that hybrid apps are essentially web-based, they don’t work without the Internet connection. Moreover, as all the elements of the app have to be loaded, the performance speed is generally slower. Needless to say, this imposes a ton of connection limitations on the application user. Connection issues are a significant difference between native and hybrid app development.
OS Inconsistencies
Due to the fact that hybrid apps share a codebase, certain features might be supported by Android and not displayed on an iOS device and vice versa. It takes more testing sprints to identify inconsistencies and a ton of modifications to fix these issues.
Hybrid App Examples
While at first glance hybrid apps might seem like nothing but a cheap fix, in reality, a fair share of top social media applications is, in fact, hybrid. Let’s take a look at most popular hybrid app examples:
Gmail
Gmail is the most popular email provider in the world at the moment. It has been a web HTML-application for a long time. Gmail’s mobile application is a powerful combination of the native web-application infrastructure and native application.
The hybrid application for Gmail is just as solid in its performance as its PC version. The high customization level and dozens of features prove that hybrid application can be just as rewarding as a native one in the long run.
Using the hybrid development approach allowed developers to create an app that supports rich media. While the Instagram feed can’t be refreshed when there’s no Internet connection, you can still access data that has been loaded already.
As of now, Instagram has over a billion downloads. This proves the convenience and power of hybrid apps.
Cross-Platform Mobile Apps
There are distinct operating systems running on various smartphones with Android and iOS featuring as the most widely used. Each of these platforms utilizes a distinctive programming environment with its own language and API.
As such, the need by mobile developers to reach the largest possible user-base, regardless of their preferred platform has given rise to more value being seen in a cross-platform mobile app. Tools like Xamarin have made cross-platform app development widely popular and accessible.
Why a Cross-Platform App?
Applications created utilizing a cross-platform framework are free from OS impulses and thus offer multi-platform usefulness. They provide an incredible solution when you need to release a mobile app on different platforms at a low cost or constrained budget in terms of money, time, and effort.
Pros of Building a Cross-Platform App
Cost-Effective
The issue of native app vs cross-platform apps can be debated but when it comes to cost efficiency, cross-platform development beats the latter hands down. In addition to most cross-platform development tools being unreservedly available, the approach further spares the cost of having to contract separate developers to create apps for different platforms.
Reusable
With cross-platform apps, developers no longer have to write unique code for each operating system. They can instead use a common codebase to transfer the code to different platforms.
Cons of Building a Cross-Platform App
Complex Development Pross
It takes a skilled developer to create an application that would be well-adapted to a few platforms. Basically, there’s a need to keep all the little differences between operating systems and the hardware they run on especially when it comes to implementing a complex interface and features.
Challenging Integrations
Developers can experience difficulties while integrating cross-platform applications to local settings and engaging a third-party cloud service provider. The code of an HTML5 cross-platform app is complicated as the result of callback-style programming used to communicate with native plugins.
Cross-Platform App Examples
There are dozens of cross-platform apps that we use every day. They prove the efficiency of cross-platform development as well as the benefit from creating products for a few platforms with tools like React or Nativescript simultaneously.
Back in 2012, Mark Zuckerberg stated at a TechCrunch Disrupt conference: “The biggest mistake we’ve made as a company is betting on HTML5 over native.” He noted that the experience of maintaining a native app on iOS has proven to be faster in the long run and more liberating than the hybrid approach the company used before. Hybrid apps are known to be quite slow for users, and, as a high-traffic application, Facebook needed to provide as fast and seamless of an experience as possible. That’s why the company has shifted from HTML to React Native — a framework designed to create native Android and iOS apps.
Skype
Skype has been around for quite a while now — it is widely used across various devices and operating systems. In fact, a famous communication tool is a cross-platform app developed with Electron. On a PC scale, it shares a codebase between Windows and Linux. When it comes to smartphones, Skype has a cross-platform iOS/Android app.
The user experience of Skype doesn’t suffer from system limitations or a complex codebase. In fact, last year, the development team completely redesigned the app to make sure it looks native-alike.
Slack
Slack is proof that a cross-platform app can still have a ‘native’ feel to it. Apart from simplifying the group communication process, Slack enables access to bots and can help operate various day-to-day work tasks.
Over the span of just a few years, the platform has become everyone’s favorite collaboration service. If they would have had to choose one operating system, Slack would’ve lost a huge chunk of its audience and would never have arrived at its current peak.
What’s Best For You?
So who comes out as a winner in cross-platform vs native vs hybrid app development? When comparing the three options, there are still advantages and challenges to overcome for each specific development approach. Choosing the right one for you is determined by the talent you have available, the budget, and the time constraints.
Flutter — An Innovative App Building Approach
Flutter is Google’s open-source technology that enables the use of a single codebase for the creation of native Android and iOS apps. Rather than being a framework, it is a complete SDK (software development kit) that contains everything you require for cross-platform mobile app development.
Flutter is the only cross-platform framework that provides reactive views without requiring JavaScript Bridge. Moreover, flutter has been enormously popular with its impeccable User Experience with a sea full of flutter-based apps out there. One of the major use cases of Flutter is Google’s Adword app. A few other examples are Alibaba, a Chinese multinational E-commerce giant, Reflectly, Watermaniac, Tencent, Birch, and many more.
Some Amazing Stats About Flutter
According to Google Trends, Flutter is the second most leading language, followed by React Native for developing cross-platform mobile apps in 2020.
According to a Stackoverflow survey, Flutter is the third most loved frameworks, libraries and tools followed by .Net Core and Torch.
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