Hybrid Applications: What They Are And Their Advantages

Mobile applications are the thing that every company worth its brand needs to have. Customers expect the business to have its own app to access information, to have service alerts, and to transact and conduct their business. As a business owner, you wonder where to get that mobile app built, and all of a sudden you are inundated with all that technical mumbo-jumbo and jargon, like native, hybrid, platform-independent, and whatnot! And none of them seems to be bad enough to reject or cheap enough to accept outright.

Native vs. Hybrid

A native app is developed for a specific platform like iOS or Android using its own development tools. Native apps are built using programming languages that are used by the official platform to build their own apps. For Android, those languages are Java and Kotlin, while for iOS they are Objective-C and Swift.

Hybrid apps are created using web 4.0 technologies – JavaScript, CSS, and HTML5–combined to give a responsive experience. So technically speaking, hybrid apps are like websites, loaded within a native app window, to look, experience and function just like native apps. They can be distributed through the official marketplaces, just like native apps, App Store, and Play Store.

Also Read: What is the Cost to Develop a Hybrid vs. Native Mobile App?

Benefits of Hybrid Apps

As already mentioned, hybrid apps are websites loaded on native containers. To access native OS features, hybrid apps must use specialized APIs.

1. Multiple OS Platforms: Hybrid apps can run on both Android and iOS, covering more than 97% of the total smartphone base, with only one common codebase. This means you don’t need separate teams to build apps for each platform. This is great news for businesses who wish to target the largest possible audience base in one go. Moreover, you don’t need to decide on which platform to build your app first.
2. Enhanced UX/UI: Hybrid Apps offer a consistent and seamless user experience across all OS platforms. The lightweight hybrid app UI results in loading graphics, videos, and content faster and adapt faster to different device screens.
3. Faster &Cheaper to build: As developers do not have to create a new codebase for each platform, it’s less time-consuming to create a hybrid app. The development time directly influences the final cost of your product.
4. Easier & Economical to Maintain: Again, due to the common codebase you can update apps on all platforms in a single release. Updates containing bug fixes and enhancements are way easier to provide in hybrid applications.
5. Offline Support: Mobile applications commonly suffer from many networks and geography-related issues – data plan exhausted, limited or no network coverage, black spots, network jitter during movement, etc. Hybrid apps have offline accessibility that helps overcome these challenges to provide uninterrupted access.
6. Improved Performance: Hybrid apps now offer efficiency and performance comparable to native apps. In some cases, they are even faster because of no dependency on the network. Even with a larger number of simultaneous user requests, hybrids exhibit good speed on all devices – just look at Twitter and LinkedIn.
7. Reuse Web Application Code: If you already have a feature-rich and functional website with web services, then the code written for it can be used to build your hybrid app for all mobile platforms much faster.
8. Easy Integration With Other Apps: Native apps suffer from a lack of inter-app interoperability and communication, but hybrid apps can seamlessly integrate with other apps to share data and services with them.

Also Read: Flutter Vs React Native Vs Xamarian Vs Hybrid Vs Ionic

Hope this information is helpful, please connect with us for any further queries.