Glue Conference: Native vs. Wrapped apps and the options in between

BROOMFIELD, Colo. – Developers need to take the user experience into account when they are deciding whether to build their application to be native or wrapped for their mobile experience, said Guilhem Ensuque, director of product marketing at OpenPlug, a company acquired by Alcatel-Lucent last year as part of its Application Enablement vision.
Speaking at the Glue Conference yesterday, Ensuque showed how Facebook operates on the Apple Inc. iPhone vs. Apple’s iPad. The Facebook app on the iPhone is functional, but Facebook didn’t do anything special to have its content run on the iPad. Instead, it took the web version of Facebook, which is not well suited to the iPad, he contended. “You hav eto think about where you are in your service and your app strategy; just throwing up a website it not enough.”
Developers should think about how end users will interact with their app on their own device – and there are a lot of different devices on the market today. For example, how does the app work when a phone call comes in? Will end users be able to use other functions on their devices, like a camera or GPS service, with the app? Close integration with the device is likely important to the customer, he said.
Developers need to think about their platforms and resources when choosing whether to run a native app or a wrap-around. While it may be an easy decision to write for the iPhone operating system in the United States, the Java OS may be better if your app is suited to a market where feature phones are still the majority of devices. If developers want a pervasive app, they need to think beyond smartphones and tablets to TVs, cars and even refrigerators. “Nextflix supports 400 devices today.”
Even though Google Inc.’s Android OS is expected to be the most popular one by the end of this year, it is fragmented, creating another set of problems, Ensuque noted.
A company with a lot of resources may choose a native application even though it is expensive. Other options include a “Write once, run everywhere” app, but that philosophy has largely failed. Wrapped web apps are largely good, thanks to HTML 5. Cross-platform native apps are best because the use-experience is good for the most part. A hybrid approach that combines a wrapped and native experience also takes the best of both worlds, Ensuque said.
Most important for developers is to know themselves, and their strengths and weaknesses. Answering these questions will often get the developer to choose the right tool. One interesting point Ensuque said is the lack of iPhone developers, noting there are only 85,000 registered developers on the App Store out of a worldwide pool of 12 million developers.