Developing Hybrid Mobile Application for Your Business

It is evident that the mobile world has been growing rapidly these past few years. With the boom of internet, the usage of the handheld devices, such as smart phones, iPhones and tablets, is also growing day by day.

Due to the increasing demand and sales of smartphones and tablets, modern businesses cannot ignore the benefits of mobile apps for their customers. It is a difficult task to create an app with the perfect mix of features and platform support at reasonable cost.

In general, these are the three technologies that are used for mobile application development: native, web and hybrid mobile app development. A hybrid application leverages both native and mobile web technologies. The development process of hybrid apps includes the qualities of both the web and native application development processes.

The hybrid app development is basically built with the native programming languages such as Java, Objective C, and web technology such as HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. It is developed based on the concept WORA or Write-Once-Run-Anywhere, which is nothing but it supports all mobile devices of different operating systems.

Using this hybrid app development approach, developers write important portions of their app in cross-platform web technologies, whereas, they maintain direct access to native APIs when needed.

The native portion of the hybrid app uses the operating system APIs to build an embedded HTML rendering engine, which acts as a bridge between the device APIs and the browser. This makes the hybrid app to take the advantages of all the features that the latest devices have to provide.

A hybrid application mostly uses native features of any device such as geo-location, calendar, notification, contacts, camera, and offline storage. It also supports various features that are supported by touch screen display devices.  For graphics, a hybrid app can use HTML, Canvas and SVC. Also, a number of hybrid apps support offline work such as an online game has an offline game practice features.

The hybrid mobile app development is accessed effortlessly through the internet without using any web browser, as it uses web view control to display HTML and JavaScript files on a screen. The web view control covers WebView on Android, UIWebView on iOS, and so on.

Advantages of hybrid mobile app development:

• Uses of open source technologies such as PhoneGap, Sencha and SproutCore
• Flexible for both multi-platform and cross-platform development
• High-performance and cost-effective
• Easy to download and install features
• Highly interactive and impressive user interface
• Great access to device features
• Re-usable code base for various mobile platforms

Why a hybrid app is important for your business?

From a business viewpoint, developing a hybrid mobile app is the best idea, because this app development doesn’t require you to develop a full app for every mobile platform.

A hybrid app is cross-platform by design, and also it resolves some of the problems that some experience with web applications. From iOS to Windows Phone to Android to Blackberry OS, hybrid apps provide across-the-board functionality.

Some of the benefits of hybrid mobile apps are as follows:

• Standardized branding: Developing a hybrid app helps you to have an app that is basically standard on all mobile devices. This gives a great user experience for your customers who use your app on their mobile devices. However, if you want to update your app, then a single update will fix the app on all platforms. So, if your customers change from one mobile platform to another, the user interface of the app will remains the same.

• Better Integration: Similar to native mobile apps, hybrid mobile apps use the own code of mobile device to keep it in sync with other mobile applications. Hence, it works well with GPS, messaging, cameras and other device information to offer best service to your customers.

• Better Speed: Hybrid apps are not faster than native apps; however, they are comparatively faster than mobile web apps as they support various best features. Unlike mobile web apps, the hybrid apps will not require network communication which can be the main reason for slowdown.

• Accessibility: To ensure that your customers can able to easily access your products or services whenever they require, you need to have your app available for download in various mobile stores. Hybrid apps ensure that your app will be accessible across almost all app download platforms such as Android Google Play store, Apple App store, Windows Phone App store, and so on.

• Offline use: Similar to native apps, hybrid mobile apps use the device’s API, and hence they store some data offline. So, your customers can able to use your hybrid apps even though they have the problem with network connectivity.

So, it is important for every business to enrich or improve their mobile applications by adding the native device capabilities. To do this, it is time for you to race ahead and develop a hybrid app for your business.