Written by Abdelrahman Elghandour

Abdelrahman Elghandour is currently a Senior Projects Lead in KUWAITNET. With a degree in Information Technology & Computing , he has contributed to many projects since June 2016. He loves Traveling. He believes the more you travel and experience new places, the more open your mind will be to new things.

When it comes to choosing between mobile applications and a website many factors have an impact on that decision to be considered like the idea, budget, timeline, compatibility, support, functionality and many more.  All of those factors help determine which is more suitable and feasible for a project. Mobile applications are more instant, responsive, purposeful and convenient; while a website serves more as an informative service, the mobile version of desktop sites cannot always match the efficiency and user experience provided through a mobile application.

Lately, mobile development has been the driving force of this new, more convenient and efficient world. Mobile applications can be more productive if the project requires to capitalize on the features that are incorporated within portable devices. A primary example for this is push notifications, which allows instant notifications to be sent like messages, promotions, and updates which results in higher user engagement and traffic.

Native Vs. Hybrid

When talking about building a mobile application, we start thinking about which is the best technology to use. There are two approaches to choose between, the native approach or the hybrid approach each option has its pros and cons.

Native Applications

Native applications are developed specifically for one platform and therefore can take full advantage of the device and platform features. Programming languages, as well as frameworks for creating a native application, is completely different for Android and iOS. For example, when developing a native app for iOS, Swift or Objective-C are used. While for Android applications Java, less often in Kotlin or Scala are used. Therefore, you can’t use the same codebase for each platform which means that the code has to be rewritten entirely for the same application for different platforms.

Having a native application helps to keep the app working with each new software release while requiring minimum updates when it comes to using newly introduced features whether it’s in the software or hardware of the device.

Developing a native application helps provide a better processing speed, navigation, interaction, and responsiveness, as it has the advantage of looking and feeling consistent within its platform. But, on the other hand, native applications can be a bit costly.

Hybrid Applications

Hybrid applications, on the other hand, are developed through combining the best (or worst) of both the native and HTML5. Majority of hybrid frameworks are based on the Cordova engine; the most popular ones include PhoneGap, Ionic, IBM Mobile First.

Hybrid applications require only one codebase to cover all platforms, which can cut down in cost and time. However, different designs will still be needed for different platforms. And achieving the same level of responsiveness and gesture support as a native application can be difficult. Moreover, having a hybrid application exposes the application to the risk of breaking with each software update.

Summary

Making an application more interactive is one of the primary goals when delivering a useful app, to achieve this you need to develop every feature to be as user-friendly and convenient as possible. Even though hybrid development is cheaper compared to native development, developing an app based on native components allows capitalizing on elements like raw speed, better debugging, consistency and to attain benefit of the software’s main unique features.

AndroidDevelopment, MobileApps, SoftwareDevelopment, SoftwareTesting, StartUp, WebDesign, iOSDevelopment,