Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column. We’ve gathered a group of visionaries and veterans in the mobile industry to give their insights into the marketplace.
Native, Web or hybrid — discussion over which one should be used for app development — doesn’t seem to have abated with the new year. If anything, debate has increased, as the search for the development silver bullet intensifies. Is there a clear winner in the development sweepstakes? Let’s take a look.
Native apps, which are built for and installed on specific platforms, using platform-specific software, give a fast, consistent performance, and the look and feel that users have come to expect. The tradeoff is that they are expensive to build and maintain, and they require highly-skilled and trained developers.
Web apps are much faster and easier to deploy than native apps. They work across platforms but their capabilities are limited because they are accessed through a Web browser and require Internet connectivity. Many of the app features that users have come to expect from native apps, such as touch, camera, address book and GPS, are not available with Web apps. But the “write once, run anywhere” technology makes them easy to distribute, support and update.
Hybrid apps are installed on devices, like native apps, but are actually written using Web technologies that are wrapped inside a native container, giving them access to the native platform features that users crave. There is no standard definition for hybrid apps. They can be implemented in a number of different ways and combinations, but their strength is in the combination of the Web-based development environment and the power of native applications.
There’s no easy answer as to which of these development tools should be used. No one tool is right for all app development. Time to market, cost, efficiency, user experience, performance, resources, accessibility and device fragmentation must be prioritized and weighed against the goals for the app as well as overall business goals. The dialogue about which to use will continue and probably intensify over the next year.
Fernando Alvarez leads Capgemini’s recently launched Mobile Solutions Global Service Line.
