Are you planning to develop your own app? Software development companies can come to the rescue when you face certain pitfalls on your way. But before choosing the app development company, first, you must determine what your app should be.
That is you need to find the correct strategy applicable in your case.There is no a single good and unique mobile app strategy that would be appropriate for everybody. You should remember that everything depends on your specific requirements. Considering and analyzing them, you can find something special for you app development. Are you ready to find out?
Step 1: Native app vs hybrid app or why not a cross platform?
Let's start from the very beginning - that is from the selection of the app type. What platform you will choose, and what platform type will be more acceptable for you.
Mobile website, mobile app - they are different. Each of them serves its goal, but the app can be more advantageous at the expense of wider capabilities and high responsive interface. This interface makes it possible to interact with a smartphone or tablet in a more comfortable way. Furthermore, such app can work without a permanent Internet connection.
For today, there are native and cross-platform mobile app development alternatives. Each of these approaches has its particularity that critically affects a final result. Let's check strong and weak sides of these two approaches to understand what technology is better.
Native app
What is a native app? Native apps such as an Internet browser, address book, media player and other software installed by default provide a basic level of a smartphone using.The app can be called native when programmers use one specific language for the specific platform - Java for Android, Swift for iOS etc. Native apps can interact with all services and options of a smartphone like a camera, microphone, geolocation, accelerometer etc. In a short, these apps are in their element.
Cross-platform app development
Think about a mobile website that doesn’t need to connect to the Internet all the time. As for its design, it is closer to cross-platform. Therefore, it can be referred to a mobile app instead of a website.HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are usually used for the development of such apps. Mobile websites are developed in the same way. Cross-platform application is targeted for all platforms and adapted to the majority of devices since a browser engine is used for its functioning.
Hybrid app
However, if we speak about the solution of specific tasks, it would be much more efficient to combine these approaches - apply cross-platform advantages of HTML for a content design, but create native control elements and menu spending not so much money and time. That is what hybrid apps are.Let’s check out hybrid apps example. A customer needs ordinary news feed where only images and text will be available. Considering it, a developer decides to apply a cross-platform alternative. However, when a client needs his app to contain a huge amount of data and process sound and graphics, the process turns out to be more complicated. To implement it, developers need to write a native code for each specific platform. Thus, a cross-platform app turns into a hybrid app.
