Why Hybrid App Development is the best choice to build your business app?

Engineering the best customer experience is a prime consideration for businesses than anything when they begin riding the mobile race. It’s the key factor that can make or break the app’s success.

It starts with mobile application development, but before entering into the sphere of development after partnering with a mobile app development company, it’s all-important to decide the approach that the businesses want to take, Native or cross-platform or hybrid. Do they want to entice the users by building native apps that mesmerize the users with amazing experiences? Or interested in hybrid app development that can be quickly developed and deployed across a multitude of devices?

The battle between the two development approaches has been going on for years. Still, it’s on, as both approaches have their pros and cons. We will not get into this debate and first take a quick overview of hybrid app development.

What Is Hybrid App Development?

The hybrid apps are coded once and the app works on every device and platform. These apps look like native apps on devices, but when it comes to utilization of the phone’s basic features, hybrid apps perform out-of-box and can access native devices’ features such as device cameras, GPS, push notifications, and calendars with the help of plugins. In reality, hybrid apps are mobile web apps that are built leveraging HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript that are packaged in a native wrapper.

The wrapper technology is mainly used in the form of different frameworks like- Ionic, Xamarin, React Native, PhoneGap, and more. The hybrid apps are available on the app store and can be installed on the device just like native apps with easy accessibility. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are some of the best instances of hybrid apps that work on multiple devices with various resolutions. Hybrid app development companies can help you create another success story the way leading players have created leveraging hybrid approaches.

Let’s discuss the reasons that are making hybrid app development a preferred choice for businesses:

Which are the Benefits Of Hybrid App Development?

Make the development affordable

With rising competition in the market, the app development cost is also dropping, but the cost of building separate apps for different platforms is expensive as opposed to building one app that works impeccably on all the platforms.

For hybrid apps, the developers just need to code once, and then by changing the native wrapper, the apps for the different platform can be created, which reduce the efforts, time, and cost incurred in the development.

The hybrid app development approach is a cost-effective method to get build apps for multiple platforms at the cost and time expense of one app development. The high degree of code shareability and reduced maintenance cost minimize the expenditure associated with hybrid apps. When you hire remote developers, the overall development cost gets reduced by a large margin.

User Experience – the critical differentiator

In the last couple of years, the user experience is completely transformed and that’s the reason the absolute change is found on the websites of now and 10 years ago.

The user experience can be heightened by the apps when users browse the app and accomplish the task without even thinking once that they are using a new application. The hybrid apps also share a similar familiarity with simple UI and easy-to-understand functions, which makes the app accessibility easier and fosters user engagement.

Furthermore, in hybrid apps, the content is directly updated from the web server as needed, which doesn’t require the users to download the new version of the app after a while. The updates are rolled out automatically which provides a refreshing app experience to the users effortlessly, which in turn gratify them.

Win the performance war

Speed is the key determinant for a mobile app to accelerate the app’s prominence in the market and grab the users’ attention. That’s where hybrid apps outshine as they only have a native wrapper that needs to be downloaded to the user’s phone and the rest of the data is loaded in real-time as users browse the app. It improves the speed at which the app performs.

However, when the number of server requests and load balance requests gets increases, the overall performance of the app is impacted.

Increase time-to-market the app

Sometimes, businesses find an untapped opportunity and wanted to shape the app idea into a mobile reality as early as possible. The decision to develop a mobile app that runs seamlessly on different platforms can be taken in a matter of minutes, but executing the plan and getting the mobile app built takes weeks to months, which sounds too long.

Here, hybrid apps can get the job done as they outdo building minimum viable products and launching the complete mobile solution at speed because the app built using one source code can be released everywhere. The hybrid approach fits well when businesses need rapid prototyping and app development.

A faster time to market for your app is necessary because it will boost the prospects of business growth for your eCommerce business. Cross-platform app development helps businesses achieve a faster time-to-market as a business needs to build only a single cross-platform app and not two native ones. Moreover, if you need to transform or customize the app, it takes less time to make changes in a single code as opposed to making changes in two or more codebases.

Top cross-platform app development companies create reliable and robust cross-platform apps that can work on multi-platform devices and, are industry-leading by following the above practices. You need to choose the best one that is ideal for your business requirements.

Release cycles- another reason to prefer the hybrid approach

Even the cross-platform advocate speech on the surface of cross-platform app development sounds brilliant. But this is not the case always.

The hybrid app top when it comes to scaling the app’s features and functionalities and rolling out the change on the user’s device. The changes can be incorporated directly from the web server, so the developers don’t need to wait for the app store’s approval for the new updates and users won’t require updating the app every time a new version is released. Why is it so?

As the hybrid app makes changes in the content on the web server, the updates get easily loaded and become visible to the users instantly as they navigate through the app. When hybrid app development companies introduce new features, then users need to download them.

Single codebase management

The hybrid apps are created with an approach that they are developed once and made to work on all the major operating systems. The developer-friendliness makes the developer happy as they need to create and manage one code base to enable the app to perform flawlessly on iOS and Android OS, unlike native app development which doubles up the effort and time investment.

Easy scalability

When the app is developed using a hybrid development approach or cloud-native technologies, deploying the app on limited platforms and later scaling them to new platforms is feasible. Unlike native development, it won’t require the developers to start building everything from scratch.

Offline availability

The native infrastructure enables the hybrid apps to work in low-to-zero network conditions as the previously loaded data is cached which automatically gets loaded when the users access the application. Though accessing real-time data is not feasible but the basic features are accessible.

Maximize reach

A cross-platform app can work on multiple platforms. This trait of a cross-platform app proves to be a major advantage for the app as it helps the app maximize its reach. The cross-platform app can reach users of multiple platforms like iOS and Android easily.

Quicker development process

As compared to native apps, the development time of a cross-platform app is significantly quick. With native apps, the app owners need to employ a separate team of app developers for each platform. Two teams take up more time to build, test and deploy two apps. This is not the case with cross platform apps, as only a single team can build the app for various platforms.

Easy maintenance

Maintaining two native apps for different platforms is far more difficult than maintaining a single cross-platform app. It is easier to debug and update a single cross platform app as compared to two native apps. The developers can save a lot of time and money as they have to maintain a single codebase, and the updates can be easily synced over all the platforms and devices.

Easy integration with cloud

Cloud is one of the most popular technologies as it provides security, scalability, ease of use, and reliability to the app. Using modern app development technologies, it is easy to integrate cross-platform mobile apps into cloud hosting services.

Cross-platform apps can take benefit of the various plugins that are integrated with the cloud settings. The developers can integrate a single source code with multiple extensions to improve the scalability and functionality of the app.

Uniform design

Consistency in user design is one of the most important factors that contribute to a smooth user experience. If the design is not consistent across devices and platforms, then it can lead to confusion amongst the users. This confusion will deter users from using the app and will act as a catalyst for the app’s failure.

Maintaining a uniform design across multiple native apps on different platforms can prove to be a headache. The cross-platform apps allow the developers to maintain a consistent design and feel of the app across various platforms.

Disadvantages Of Cross Platform App Development

Now that we have seen why you should go for cross-platform app development, we will see at the other side of the coin and see some precautionary measures that you will need to keep in mind when you go for cross platform mobile app development.

Performance

A major reason why businesses opt for native apps instead of cross-platform ones is the lack of performance. The performance issues get magnified in apps that need access to devise hardware like GPS and camera to deliver good performance. For simple apps and for those apps that do not require access to devise hardware, there is no noticeable difference in performance.

UX and UI Design

As native apps have separate codes for iOS and Android, they happen to be more user-focused toward UI and UX design. Conversely, with cross-platform app development, the developers have to use a single codebase for both platforms, hence they are not able to utilize all the platform-specific UI/UX design features. Poor UI/UX design can be eliminated by hiring expert cross-platform app developers.

Time to market for new features

With native apps, whenever Google or Apple provide updates, new SDKs are provided with the updates. This is not the case with a cross-platform framework, as it takes much more time for them to release updates. Cross-platform app development frameworks that have a great developer community can mitigate this issue.

5 Best Examples Of Hybrid Apps

The enormous benefits of hybrid application development appeal the businesses worldwide to avail of the development approach. Here are a couple of examples of hybrid apps that have mobilized user journey with faster turnaround.

Uber

One of the top honchos in the mobile taxi booking universe has transformed the taxi booking game with easy bookings available at reasonable rates all the time. It enables people to get a taxi and go anywhere in a few clicks without needing to wait for hours for the taxi to arrive. Uber’s tech stack is versatile that includes varieties of technologies- Java, JS, and Objective C.

Instagram

The social media platform well-famous for sharing photos and videos is acquired by Facebook’s owner Mark Zuckerberg a few years back. The platform owner realized at a later stage that leveraging HTML5 was a big mistake. Instagram was built using React Native and its timeline is a WebView.

Twitter

The social media application centered around a short burst of text available in two flavors- Twitter and Twitter Lite. Twitter Lite is a progressive web app that’s built using front-end technologies such as Node.JS, React Native and Express. It’s known for rendering high performance and native-like UI despite low network conditions.

Apple app store

The big brand doesn’t require any introduction. Its name is enough where Apple fans to purchase and install applications. Apple app store is itself made up of hybrid elements in addition to native elements.

Evernote

The note-taking app is great for the busy person to maintain a list of to-do things on the mobile screens. The app has extended its functionality to multiple devices syncing, multimedia content sharing, and formatting tools. Its underlying architecture is built using hybrid technologies.

Summing it up

Hybrid mobile app development will dominate the development landscape by standing at the cross-road of easy development, faster deployment, reduced time-to-market, easy updates, lower cost and high performance without making any compromise with the end-user experience.

The plus points up the ante of hybrid mobile apps and makes it leveraged by the leading platforms such as Facebook’s React native has become the part and parcel of hybrid app development.

Do you want to enjoy the advantages of making your app on all the app stores right away? If so, narrow down your search for reliable hybrid app development companies and get a mobile app that works flawlessly everywhere.