Hybrid v/s Native – The Never Ending Debate

In today’s world, there is an app for almost any task that is on your mind: cooking, insurance, dating, simulation, etc. More importantly, before going forward with any decision, you need to ask yourself which path you would like to go with: Hybrid or Native? Knowing the pros, cons, and limitations to each side, you may predict the future of your app.

Let us take a closer look at these two sides:

Native Apps
A native app is a smartphone application that has been specifically developed for a certain mobile operating system. Hence, we can take full advantage of the features and capabilities of the operating system which means that apps run faster and smoother.

Hybrid Apps
Hybrid apps are same as any other application but they are built using web technologies like HTML, CSS and Javascript. The main difference is that the Hybrid apps use a mobile platform Webview inside a native application. They look very similar to any other native app, but at the end of the day, the application is basically a company’s website inside a container.  Applications like these include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

Speed and User Experience
There are a few major development frameworks that you can choose from: Ionic,  Xamarin,  React Native, PhoneGap, etc. A native app is faster and more reliable than a hybrid app in its very design. A native app user doesn’t have to depend on the internet to download or wait for all the elements to load as it is already stored locally.  Since a hybrid app depends on downloading large amounts of data, there may be a huge impact on the overall performance and speed of the app, the frequency of server requests and the load on the requests made.

Conclusion
Hence, if we look at the wider picture, a company that uses hybrid apps is more likely to spend more time fixing and optimising the app because of user issues that arise from user-interface elements or performance issues.

With UserExperience being the main differentiator, the problem with hybrid app development is that it is very difficult to cater to platforms that are simply too diverse. IPhone and Android styles are so different that from a design perspective any decision becomes a huge compromise.

Each approach has its pros and cons but at the end of the day, a native approach will have the biggest benefits.

 
Sambert Rodrigues