When investing in building a mobile app, entrepreneurs and businesses often find themselves at the crossroads. With so many options to pick from, their dilemma revolves around deciding which type of app will be best for their business or service. So what are those key determining factors one needs to consider before fixing on a solution? But before we delve into understanding and choosing the right platform, let’s begin with knowing more about Native apps, Hybrid apps, and Cross-platform apps.

Native Apps:

Native apps are developed for specific platforms and hence are known to be fast and highly responsive. When talking about user inputs and outputs, these apps are interactive, smoother, and intuitive. This makes the user experience better, engaging, and also offers robust security. Since the native application is designed pertaining to a particular platform, the developer has the free hand of optimizing the app as per the native platform on which it is being built. Apple and Google provide app developers with their own set of development tools, SDK, and interface elements. Most would choose this app because of the myriad of benefits it has to offer when compared with Hybrid. Though the initial cost tends to be a bit higher with native mobile app development, one will end up saving up a lot of time and money in the longer run. By leveraging the device features, the business can offer better service, high performance, and great user experience. The combination of multiple advantages of Native apps will result in higher conversions and ultimately boost customer confidence and loyalty in your services. Here is how the Ionic framework can be used to assemble astonishing local portable Native apps.

Hybrid Apps:

Built with the help of HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, the Hybrid apps are functional throughout all platforms. It will save a lot of money and time as there is only a single code written once and can also be run as a progressive web app providing ease in operation for the users. Hybrid apps are famed to deliver good user experience and performance across all platforms. The Hybrid mobile app can be a good choice if the business has enough time on their hands to explore the market. As discussed earlier, this is essentially a web app but due to lightweight native app “container” that allows it to leverage certain native platform features and device hardware likes calendar, push notifications, camera, etc which a web application cannot access.

Cross-Platform Apps:

Lately, there has been a substantial demand for cross-platform mobile apps due to its multiple mobile usage approaches. A well developed cross-platform app can access the product in more than one platform, a definite advantage to the users of today. And also such apps are preferred because they are based on the common language for scripting and generally very simple to use. Cross-platform mobile apps are developed using an intermediate language that may not be native to the devices operating system, for example, Javascript. This concludes that some or all of this code can be shared across multiple platforms in both iOS and Android. Now, cross-platform apps are different when compared to HTML5 Hybrid apps, as these usually use a mix of mobile app concepts and native apps to build an application.

Simply put, all three mentioned above come with their benefits and flaws so the choice of what to use for building an app solely depends on the demand of the organization or the stakeholders of a business. But, in the end, a choice must be made keeping in mind user satisfaction and their experience in order to be successful in the longer run.