Native vs Hybrid Apps

From selecting an OS to choosing various types of themes, when you are getting an app built for your business, there will be many such choices you will need to make. Each of these choices is equally important and will influence the success of your app, the profits you will earn and the overall ROI you will receive. It is a daunting task, yes. And just one wrong step can doom the app and taint your reputation in the market.

But you don’t need to worry of course if you have done your research and have planned ahead of time. Among many such excruciatingly hard decisions which you will have to make, one will be whether you want to build a Native app or a Cross-platform app. Let us put both of them under a microscope and pick out their pros and cons.

Before We Begin

For those of you who don’t know the difference between a Native and Cross-platform app, here are the basic definitions of both.

Native Apps: These are the apps which are developed for one platform or device only.

Cross-Platform apps: These are the apps which are developed for multiple platforms and devices at the same time.

Pros and Cons of Native Apps

Pros of Native Apps

1. Experience: Native apps are developed for a particular platform and can use the powers of that platform to the fullest and make use of various features such as camera, GPS, mic, etc. Native apps give you a whole experience.

2. Performance: Native apps are fast and efficient and crash less than Cross-platform apps. As they are designed for particular platforms separately, they can use the power of that platform to the maximum to provide a more stable and seamless experience for the user.

3. Safe: Native apps are secure since they can only be downloaded from original apps stores and not from any third party links. Because of this, each app is thoroughly tested and reviewed before it is made available to the users.

4. Some other pros of Native apps are:

• Better UI feel
• Better UX
• Better internet connectivity.

Cons of Native Apps

1. The high cost of development: Due to the irregular distribution of the smartphone market, it is not enough that you get your app developed for just one platform. In this cut-throat market, you can not afford to alienate an entire class of people. So you will have to get it developed for more than one platform. And that means it will cost you extra. Every platform will require a new development budget, and thus, it will cost you more.

2. Even after you have invested in a Native app, there is no guarantee that an app store will accept your app. The Apple App Store is notorious for turning down a plethora of apps just because they didn’t match its ridiculously high expectations. This can further add a surplus on your development budget, either you will need to get it tweaked and changed according to the app store, or you will, in the end, have to give up on it and start all over again. So getting a Native app built is a risky job.

Pros and Cons of Cross-Platform Apps

Pros of Cross-Platform Apps

1. Unified Development: The biggest pro of hybrid apps is that you are building an app for multiple platforms in the cost of one. This saves you a lot of money since you won’t be needing various development processes for numerous platforms. With just a little bit of tweaking, a single app will work on different platforms.

2. Hybrids apps have only a single code base, that means there is only one code which will generate apps for various platforms. Since there is only one app to deal with, the workload dwindles exponentially.

3. Hybrid apps cost less because only one developer can make apps for Android, iOS, and Windows. From starting to ending, one code can be managed by only one developer.

4. Hybrid apps, on top of being cheap, are fast to develop as well. The overall testing time is shorter than Native apps as well. Furthermore, Hybrid apps are more flexible than Native apps.

5. Other pros of Cross-platform apps are:

• Offline support
• Interactive components
• Efficient scaling
• Cons of Cross-platform apps

Cons of Cross-Platform Apps

1. Slow Performance: You can’t get everything in the world. Since hybrid-platform provides you a cheaper solution, it is only apparent that it will have some drawbacks. Hybrid apps are very slow sometimes, and some apps are completely unusable because of the functionalities they need to do, cannot be achieved at such poor performance. The prime reason why they are slow is that Hybrid Apps are a merger of web applications and Native apps. These apps make use of platforms like Cordova which adds more time to its response period.

2. One factor Hybrid apps lack severely behind from Native apps is UX. While Native apps provide a flawless UX, Hybrid suffers to keep up.

Conclusion

To conclude, it is safe to say that if you are not bound by financial and timing constraints, then you should go for Native apps. They provide quality apps with gorgeous UI and flawless UX with great performance.

But if you are working under a time limit and a strict financial barrier, then Hybrid-apps might be the best fit for you.

If you are looking to get an app built for your business, Native or Hybrid, contact us at Matellio and give us a chance to help you out.