This topic is the talk of the town for several top mobile app development companies in India. Various organizations baffle while opting the mobile technology. So, we are here to help you. But, before diving deep into the nuts and bolts and figure out which technology is the best for a mobile application, it’s essential to know that,
Customer Experience is the most important factor for your business.
Mobile is a personal device that stays with the user all the time. Therefore, you should ponder upon its responsiveness, reliability, user-friendliness, and interactivity.
App development and designing mainly rely on these elements. A user will only use your app if s/he finds it easy to use and easy to understand. But the biggest problem that hinders you is the development time and cost. In this competitive world, we don’t deny that whatever strategies are planned needs to be executed instantly. But, what about customer experience?
This is also one of the truths- Nobody has sufficient time to deduce the issues in the app and report to the respective person. Neither your customers nor your employees.
Advances in Technology
Various top mobile app development companies in India prefer native development when organizations think about smooth app performance. Native development facilitates a user to experience inbuilt device features in the app and easily interact with it.
For example; You have an app concept which needs camera support. Native development enables you to integrate device camera with the app and use it hassle-free.
But with the changing time, things are taking a new shape. To continuously take the advantage of the business competition, organizations are not willing to invest an extra time on designing and development an app for a separate platform. Hence, app developers came across cross platform technology which allows them to share the same code in different platform and reduce the market time.
PhoneGap is the developer's choice when you go for cross platform technology. Though it supports all the major platforms, it has its own disadvantages. However, it is not the only tool, there are various other tools available on the web that helps you in building cost-effective cross platform apps.
Today, it is extremely difficult to get a strong user base for business applications. On one end, organizations don’t want to waste time on developing apps for individual platforms. Whereas, on other end, users are looking for new advancements in the app. In such scenario, what app developers need now is the unique solution that live up to the expectations of the both the parties.
It’s not Native, It’s Not Cross Platform, It’s Hybrid
When you look for developing a business application, you think about running your app in all major platform even on lower device versions. But you also need to consider the size of the application. There may be users who would run your app on the device with 1GB storage capacity.
Though native development gives you the expected outcome and better app performance it may not satisfy the above requirements.
For instance;
While developing an iPhone app, the device list is inbuilt in the menu bar of Xcode platform for testing purpose. With the advances in OS platform and coding techniques, it becomes difficult for developers to code for the lower version.
Same goes for Android apps. Android development has an additional headache of the number of devices. Being an open source technology, Android has 24000+ devices in the market. Therefore, developers have to consider different types of OS, number of devices, and device versions while coding an Android application. And, this is really a difficult job.
Cross Platform, on the other hand, use PhoneGap, Xamarin, Unity3d framework to develop an application. Using Javascript as the main programming language, it allows developers to deploy apps on all the platforms and hastens the market time. Doing so, the technology saves your paramount time and money but affects the app performance. Cross Platform technology does not directly interact with the hardware of the device, it simply runs your application in a webView keeping the app layout intact. Hence, your app cannot fully employ the features of the device and perform CPU intensive task which annoys users from using it.
Hybrid Apps is the perfect technology for your business application. It’s a myth that Hybrid is the cross platform technology. Hybrid technology enables app developers to reuse the code in different platforms and also allow them to use native programming languages like Swift, Objective C or Java to implement certain modules. Such apps consume the same memory, GPU and CPU resources giving users a complete native experience.
For instance; If you wanna build an app like Facebook using Hybrid technology, you can share the same code for Android and iOS platforms to implement share, comment and like feature. In supplement to that, it gives you the flexibility to write native code to integrate device camera with your app separately for both the platforms.
Hybrid technology comprises the advantages of both these platforms. It saves time, reduces development cost, minimizes app testing, benefits you early deployment and still, gives users a feeling of a native application.
React Native: Framework Used To Build Hybrid Apps
React Native was introduced by Facebook to build Facebook products. But due to its features, it became immensely popular in and out of Facebook.
→React Native is built upon React.js to help developers share the code across different platforms. React.js is a Javascript library used to build UI components.
→It allows developers to split the application into different parts, each representing a separate view. Hence, there is no load to update an entire application, when changes are made in a single app function.
→Coding is predictive, so app testing is easy and rapid.
→It uses bridge concept to port Javascript into Native widgets so that the app acts a native application.
Final Thoughts
Yes, Hybrid wins the battle. Thanks to the advances in technology and development techniques which has made developing easy and qualitative. Hybrid with React is the best option to craft cost-effective and high-quality mobile apps.