Comprehensive Guide Between Hybrid Framework and Native Operating System

by Dipanjan Saha Mobile Application & Web Developer

Mobile App Development is a huge opportunity for all developers, but language and platform differences can make it difficult to know where to start. You might be thinking of developing a mobile application, but confused how to go about it or from. The very moment you decide to invest in a mobile app. The moment you decide to build an app, you are faced with many decisions. Technical business also which is the best for your business – a native app or a hybrid app? Let’s find out.

What is Native Operating System in the field of mobile technology?

A native application is a software program that is developed to use on a particular platform or device. Native app is a smartphone application that is coded in a specific programming language, such as Objective C for iOS or Java for Android operating systems. It has the ability to use device-specific hardware and software. Native apps live on the device and are accessed through icons on the device home screen. Native apps are installed through an application store (such as Google Play or Apple’s App Store). It can provide optimized performance and take advantage of the latest technology, such as a GPS, compared to web apps or mobile cloud apps developed to be generic across multiple systems. And native apps can use the device’s notification system and can work offline. However, this type of app is expensive to develop because it is tied to one type of operating system, forcing the company that creates the app to make duplicate versions that work on other platforms.

Some benefits of native applications are:

• Need for speed: It is all about now; we expect instant noodles all the time every time. Getting the most of your hardware is important when working with limited resources. According to some studies, even a delay of 2 seconds can distract the user. 1 second and after 1 second, may become distracted. Big players like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Bank of America have learned this lesson the hard way by first investing in HTML5 and later going back to native for performance reasons. When you put wheels to the road, native will always have the lead.
  
  
• IDE: Specialized development environments are the ecosystems that allow developers to create native applications. Both iOS and Android have comprehensive tools for everything from design to testing giving these platforms a leg up on the competition. With these tools, you can tune, analyze and trace, unlocking the highest performance and experience possible. Reduced development time gives more time to developer to fix the most difficult bugs.
  
  
• Native Look and Feel: We love being at home. Your application feels like it belongs to your device. Native apps are natural extensions of the platform that smell look and feel like the default apps. Users quickly pick up on nuanced differences like the use of a specific icon or button. Even the older iOS versions out-dated in comparison to new native apps. Mobile applications that try to reproduce the look often come out worse due to the uncanny valley effect.
  
  
• Usability: While using native applications, you expect specific functionality as well as design patterns like zoom and multi-touch. Even the back button location differs between devices. These functions are easily accessed in native APIs while get worse with other methods.
  
  
• Advanced UI Interactions: Advanced UX/UI Native development suits high-end apps like games that require high user interaction and attention. Native Android and iOS apps provide a natural experience for their users by following specific UI standards shared by apps developed for these platforms. Native gives you the ability to do custom without jumping off the rails. Native apps inherit their devices' OS interfaces, making them look and feel like a wholly integrated part of the device.
  

 Here are some of the most popular native operating systems

Android is a mobile operating system developed by Google, based on a modified version of the Linux kernel and other open source software and designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. In addition, Google has further developed Android TV for televisions, Android Auto for cars and Wear OS for wrist watches, each with a specialized user interface. Variants of Android are also used on game consoles, digital cameras, PCs and other electronics.

iOS is a mobile operating system developed by Apple. It was originally named the iPhone OS, but was renamed to the iOS in June, 2009. While Apple's iOS provides a more basic user interface than Mac OS X, each new version adds more features. For example, iOS 2 provided access to the App Store, which allowed users to download and install third-party apps on their iPhones. Apple has been significantly praised for incorporating thorough accessibility functions into iOS, enabling users with vision and hearing disabilities to properly use its products.

A windows is a graphical interface element used to display the contents of an application for the user to view and interact with. Windows makes a computer system user-friendly by providing a graphical display and organizing information so that it can be easily accessed. The window is essential in facilitating multitasking in a modern operating system, as it allows users to visually and manually switch between running applications and make general interactions with the operating system.

The BlackBerry is a line of smartphones that are optimized for e-mail and collaboration. These are currently designed, manufactured, and marketed by TCL Communication (under the brand of BlackBerry Mobile), BB Merah Putih, and Optimums for the global, Indonesian, and Indian markets (respectively) using the BlackBerry brand under license. However, BlackBerry has since lost its dominant position in the market due to the success of the Android and iOS platforms; the same numbers had fallen to 23 million in March 2016.

Symbian is an operating system for smartphones. It is the successor of Symbian OS (operating system) and uses a user interface component based on the 5th Edition of S60. Symbian was originally developed as a closed-source OS for PDAs in 1998 by the Symbian Ltd. Consortium. Symbian was used by many major mobile phone brands, like Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and above all by Nokia. The Symbian OS is open for third-party development by independent software vendors, enterprise IT departments, network operators and Symbian OS licensees.

Now we will learn about Hybrid Technologies which is gradually becoming popular in Industry

Hybrid apps are part of native apps & a part of web apps. (Because of that, many people incorrectly call them “web apps”). Like native apps, they live in an app store and can take advantage of the many device features available. Hybrid mobile applications are built in a similar manner as websites. Both use a combination of technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Nowadays, hybrid mobile app development uses Apache Cordova. Apache Cordova offers a consistent platform along with a set of JavaScript APIs that allows a developer to access device capabilities with the help of plugins. Hybrid apps are also popular because they allow cross platform development and thus significantly reduce development costs that is, the same HTML code components can be reused on different mobile operating systems. Tools such as PhoneGap and Sencha Touch allow people to design and code across platforms, using the power of HTML.

A hybrid application (hybrid app) is one, that combines elements of both native and web applications. Here is a list of the most prominent benefits that you can experience as a result of hybrid mobile app development.

• Enhanced User Experience: People who use mobile apps pay special attention to user experience. If you want to deliver an enhanced user experience to users, you need to think about hybrid mobile app development. When you open a specific website like facebook.com, google.com, wisebeards.com on two different browsers, you can figure out notable changes. Hybrid mobile app development can assist you in overcoming this, and all users will get the opportunity to experience a consistent UI as a result of it.
  
  
• Availability: Some mobile users have difficulties when it comes to downloading and installing a new mobile app. However, a large percentage of users still continue to use mobile apps after downloading. As per the statistics of 2013, about 80 million apps have been downloaded by smartphone users. Hybrid mobile app development is in a position to keep the app users away from frustration associated with this.
  
  
• Speed: People tend to use mobile apps in order to make their lives easy. However, in case if the mobile app takes a lot of time to give out responses, you would not feel like using it. This is one of the major difficulties that native mobile app developers will have to face. Hybrid mobile apps are in a position to help users stay away from this hassle. It can deliver a seamless experience to the users as well.
  
  
• Ease of Integration: You can find some similarities between hybrid mobile apps and native mobile apps. For example, both these apps use the programming language of the device in order to synchronize with other compatible apps. As a result, the hybrid mobile apps would work perfectly well with messaging, cameras, GPS, and other device information in order to provide the best possible user experience. In turn, the hybrid apps work well with the device’s native applications such as camera, messaging, GPS, etc. to ensure a smooth user experience.
  
  
• Offline Use: Hybrid apps also use the API of the device in order to store some useful information offline. This can be considered a prominent benefit that is delivered to customers who prefer to save money that is meant to be spent on data. Some mobile users have poor connectivity with their mobile devices, and the offline usage capabilities associated with hybrid apps can impress them, as well. As a result, they will be able to use the mobile app without frustration.
  

 Some of the popular Hybrid applications are:

Xamarin: Xamarin is a Microsoft-owned San Francisco California-based software company founded in May 2011 which has cross-platform implementations of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) and Common Language Specifications (often called Microsoft .NET). It saves your time regarding re-utilizing abilities, tools, teams and the best significant part is code. You can influence the array of Xamarin and Android APIs as well as design an amazing experience for glass with the Android SDK and GDK.

PhoneGap: This Adobe’s tool is available for multiple platforms such as Android, Windows, and iOS. This course gets practical very quickly as you'll be working with the phone hardware and interacting with the same real-world API's that professional developer’s use every day such as Google Places and Google Maps. Mobile App Development is the single Fastest Growing Segment of Development Get in on the Action with Mobile App Development with PhoneGap today!

Intel XDK: The Intel XDK allows you build cross-platform apps for each and every store. It includes web services and plugins for content-rich, interactive apps, responsive apps run on any device. Recently, they made some big changes by supporting all the capabilities you love from developing mobile HTML5 apps (including Apache Cordova) for Android, iOS, and Windows 10 UAP. You can create apps using a drag and drop approach, although it does create a lot of unnecessary code.

Ionic Framework: Ionic Framework is a complete open-source SDK for hybrid mobile app development built on top of Angular. Ionic provides tools and services for developing hybrid mobile apps using Web technologies like CSS, HTML5, and Sass. Apps can be built with these Web technologies and then distributed through native app stores to be installed on devices by leveraging Cordova. And there are more useful features like deep linking, AoT Compiling, Ionic Native.

Framework7: Framework7 is a free and open source mobile HTML framework to develop hybrid mobile apps or web apps with iOS & Android native look and feel. It is also an indispensable prototyping apps tool to show working app prototype as soon as possible in case you need to. This framework is focused only on iOS and Google Material design to bring the best experience and simplicity. Like other tools covered so far in this article, F7 is open-source and totally free of licensing or other fees.

Appcelerator Titanium: Titanium has mixed development environments provided by Xamarin and PhoneGap. Customers who standardize on Appcelerator’s solutions get to market 70 % faster and achieve a significant competitive advantage. Titanium uses Alloy, an MVC framework to enable rapid development of mobile apps. Modules created using Alloy are easy to reuse across different apps, hence significantly reducing the development time and the lines of code.

jQuery Mobile: jQuery Mobile is an ideal framework for larger companies that support BYOD, given the likely need to cater for a wide range of device types and operating systems. While many hybrid frameworks seek to deliver apps that look and behave “native,” jQuery Mobile takes a different approach. The focus of this tool is to create generic applications that perform consistently across all platforms, including Windows, Symbian, and Blackberry, with unique, if not native UIs for each.

Now here is the comparison between Native and Hybrid application

Native--

• Commonly the highest of the three choices if developing for multiple platforms.
  
• Code for one platform only works for that platform.
  
• Platform SDK enables access to all device APIs.
  
• Platform comes with familiar, original UI components.
  
• App stores provide marketing benefits, but also have requirements and restrictions.
  
• Native code has direct access to platform functionality, resulting in better performance.
  
• More monetization opportunities, but stores take a percentage.

• Similar to pure web costs, but extra skills are required for hybrid tools.
  
• Most hybrid tools will enable portability of a single codebase to the major mobile platform.
  
• Many device APIs closed to web apps can be accessed depending on the tool.
  
• UI frameworks can achieve a fairly native look.
  
• App stores provide marketing benefits, but also have requirements and restrictions.
  
• For complex apps, the abstraction layers often prevent native – like performance.
  
• More monetization opportunities, but stores take a percentage.
  

Conclusion
A mobile app is an imperative tool for every enterprise to penetrate the market quickly and stay competitive. Both native and hybrid are ways to fulfil the different needs and preferences of users and developers, and none of them can be thought as a perfect solution. And a hybrid app solution makes this task a whole lot easier and faster. Giants like Uber, Twitter, and Instagram have already leveraged the advantages of hybrid mobile app development. They have their strengths and weaknesses and it is up to you to decide which of them fits you better and which one you will use in your application. If you too are looking to capitalize through a hybrid app of your own, connect with our experts now to discuss the requirements.

If you need any service related web design, web development, mobile app development. We at Webhawks Technology always regard to help you.

Kindly contact us through our website: www.webhawksindia.com

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Created on Sep 29th 2018 04:46. Viewed 424 times.

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