Are mobile developers moving up, up and away from Native Apps?

There is a rising trend of increased mobile application users, giving an upsurge to increased supply of best mobile application developers. Another connected trend – app developers moving away from native apps.

Mobile application development, digital transformation, Android, iOS – every smartphone user will be familiar with at least one of these terms. The most popular being Android. One does not even need stats to prove this. With an increasing mobile phone user-base, mobile application development is gaining all the popularity that it deserves.

This, in turn, is increasing the demand for app developers and app development companies, alike.

But, what is it that a mobile application development company or a mobile application developer seeks while applying to work for a particular employer?

Is it the user base or the popularity of the mobile application company?

The answer is, both. Any app developer would definitely want to work on a platform that is popular and has a large user-base. Speaking of popularity Android is closely followed by iOS, while other OS platforms like Windows dwindling. Nevertheless, there are users for all these different operating systems, which has in turn led to app developers shifting away from native applications.

Starting with the basic question; what are Native mobile applications?

Native Mobile Apps - these are mobile apps developed in a programming language which is native to the respective mobile device and its operating systems, like iOS and Android. They are developed in such a way that coding is individual to each OS. Hence, making it difficult for app developers to develop apps for various OS supporting devices at any given time.

While we have addressed the fact that developers are shifting away from native apps, but what are they shifting towards? The answer is either…

Hybrid Mobile Apps – hybrid mobile apps or HTML5 hybrid mobile apps are also cross-platform apps, which render the user interface using an embedded web browser, leveraging HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Or

Low-code Cross-platform Mobile Apps – Using pre-configured elements, i.e., business modules, technology components, designs and connectors, cross-platform apps are created in minutes. These apps can then be customized to suit a business’s unique architecture and ecosystem.

While the aforementioned, is enough to summarize as to why app developers are shifting away from native apps, a few more arguments as to why this is happening can be drawn from the following -

1.    Cross-Platform Technology - a boon?

While you get more access to a device’s capabilities with native applications, it has always been a bane to app developers. This is because of the requirements of different source codes being diverse across different operating systems and devices. Moreover, for a company that wants to hire an app developer, it becomes a task to find app developers with expertise in each platform (Android, iOS and Web), as well as maintain the popularity of the app and create updates for it.

This is precisely why low-code cross-platform technology started becoming popular among app developers, as it allows them to create one source code for an application. Cross-platform apps run on more than one platform at a time and also poses an advantage to developers, who do not need to create different versions of the same app.

2.    Cost Effective?

Cross-platform technology apps or hybrid apps are more cost-effective than the native ones. Essentially, the codes developed for a cross-platform app can be used almost across 90 percent of the devices with different versions of the app. This becomes cost-effective to the company hiring mobile application developers or developing companies, as they can hire one company/person and use the apps they create across all versions of the app running of different operating systems.

One such Mobile Application Development Platform is HokuApps, which offers unique ways in which enterprises can build technology solutions. Their automated mobile application development process makes solutions more affordable, reliable and are developed at ten times the speed of other such platforms.

Additionally, HokuApps has an in-built technology that enables any app or workflow solution built on the platform to automatically work on iOS, Android & Web. Consequently, HokuApps does not have to build separate solutions for each platform, which is usually the case with conventional app developers who create apps from scratch. Subsequently making the solution at rapid speed and homogenous across all platforms.