With the increasing popularity and use of smartphones, more and more people are making use of mobile apps for a range of reasons – to shop, play games, access news and information, engage on social media platforms and other functions.
In fact, Australians love their smartphones so much they have one of the highest smartphone penetration rates in the world. As such, the use of mobile apps has grown significantly.
But with increasing competition between iOS and Android, how do you determine which platform will be best for your app? Here, we compare the pros and cons of native, cross-platform and hybrid apps.
Native mobile apps are developed in a programming language native to the device and operating system, and require one specific app to be created for one target platform.
Native mobile apps are developed in iOS (Objective-c or Swift), Andriod (Java) or Windows Phone (C#/Visual Basic & XAML).
RELATED: Not all apps are created equal: Mobile apps vs mobile-optimised web apps
Cross-platform mobile apps are developed using an intermediate language, such as Javascript, that is not native to the device’s operating system. This means that some, or all, of this code can be shared across target platforms – for instance, across both iOS and Android.
Cross-platform apps are different to HTML5 hybrid apps as hybrid apps usually incorporate a mix of native app and mobile app concepts.
Cross-platform apps are developed with Xamarin, Appcelerator, React Native and NativeScript.
Pros of developing a cross-platform mobile app
Cons of developing a cross-platform app
Some examples of cross-platform apps include
RELATED: Hybrid mobile apps: Reach more people, faster and cheaper
HTML5 hybrid mobile apps are cross-platform apps but render the user interface using an embedded web browser, leveraging HTML, CSS and Javascript.
HTML5 hybrid apps are developed with Cordova, Trigger.IO, Ionic Framework and Telerik Platform.
Pros of developing an HTML5 Hybrid mobile app
Cons of developing an HTML5 Hybrid mobile app
HTML5 UI frameworks
If you’re just leveraging Cordova to build your app, and not a full Hybrid framework such as Ionic Framework, there are a lot of great UI frameworks to choose from, including:
Some examples HTML5 hybrid mobile apps include
Posted by Chris Rickard
Thu, 21 Jan 2016
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