Now is the era of smartphones. A mobile phone is in the pockets of almost every single person in this world. Earlier, if we remember, many of us mainly used websites, and the transition from a website to a mobile phone was so swift that it was almost negligible.
The quick shift of users from computers to a mobile phone is due to the easiness of the portable device. However, mobile phones owe a lot to mobile applications.
Every business out in the market focuses mainly on developing a mobile application to increase their business growth.
Lately, mobile applications have drastically transformed, from being a simple application to holding a prestigious position in the market and the lives of business owners.
With the development of technology, many entrepreneurs have started focusing on developing the right application for their business. Hence they have built an app as a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for their businesses.
The OS market right now has just two leading game players, iOS and Android. Any application a business chooses to develop must be made, keeping the two platforms in mind.
Just Android holds around 85% of market share, and iOS holds approximately 13% market share, with this, you can imagine how vast is the user base for both of them.
In the early days of mobile application development, developers had no option but to develop a native application. A native app had to be developed separately for each of the above platforms. This was not just too time-consuming but also required extra human resources and cost.
However, the need to cater to both the platforms without the application experience varying made developers and business owners shift from native apps to hybrid apps.
Research reports state that mobile applications are expected to generate around $189 Billion of incomes through application stores and in-application promoting by 2020. According to the Statista report, there are about 2.1 million mobile applications available to download in the Google Play Store and around 2 million mobile applications in the Apple App Store.
Hence businesses need to develop an application that works at equal efficiency on both the platforms. And that can be done just with Hybrid Applications.
WHAT IS A HYBRID APP?
A hybrid application is a mobile application wherein the same application can work and run on various and numerous OS like Android, iOS, Windows, and more and in all the internet browsers like Chrome, Mozilla, IE, Opera, and so on. A hybrid application will work with the same efficiency since the code written is the same, regardless of whether it is introduced from the Apple’s App Store or Google’s Play Store.
It works with a mix of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and it isn’t written in the native programming languages like Java, Objective-C or Swift.
Ordinarily, mobile applications are developed through platform-specific app development processes utilizing their own tool; thus, once the application is built for Android, it can’t be introduced on iOS and the other way around. At that point comes hybrid apps. These applications are facilitated in a native application that utilizes a mobile platform web view, which gives access to software and hardware capabilities like contacts, accelerometer, camera, and so forth.
Simple is a blend of both native applications and web applications. Thus, these mobile applications are efficient on various platforms as well as specific platforms.
BENEFITS OF HYBRID MOBILE APP DEVELOPMENT:
- Secure Development At Lower Cost:
Hybrid application development allows developers to build a single application capable of running on various operating systems. A hybrid app is a cross-platform application that works the same on different platforms, provides the same user experience, the same efficiency, and the same performance.
A hybrid application allows the developer to write and maintain a single code base for different platforms. This saves a lot of money for business owners who want to generate excellent revenues in limited investment.
Another benefit of hybrid application development is that businesses can release their MVP before anyone else; this gives them an edge over their competitors.
- High- Speed Performance:
Till now, users are comfortably using native applications since they are considered to be fast and efficient. However, if we compare the two, it is safe to say that hybrid apps are also pretty quick and efficient.
We’ll find that hybrid apps do not rely much on network communication if we compare hybrid applications with mobile web applications or responsive websites. Hence runs faster on the device screen even if many users are using it.
A great example of a hybrid application is twitter, a microblogging site that efficiently handles massive traffic and still performs at its best.
- Offline support for apps:
The hybrid application can give offline support to its users. This helps a vast number of individuals who have restricted data consumption plans or those who live in a rural area or the ones with disruptive connections or an enthusiast traveler.
Web applications could be helpful to just those users who live in urban areas with uninterrupted and high-speed internet solutions.
Offline support provided by hybrid applications keeps the users connected to their use even when they do not have a stable internet connection to back them up.
In metropolitan cities, almost everyone uses a mobile application. The only area of concern for them is how fast the mobile application responds, or for how long they can be connected to the app even if they are not connected. They just need the attempts of reconnecting to be minimum.
The hybrid application provides users with the option of storing data locally as offline storage, which is useful for the ones who have constant connectivity issues.
Hybrid mobile app development is the future of technology; it is the next big thing that has started changing the dynamics of the existing app development structure.
In the future, we will see more and more companies indulging themselves in hybrid application development to create an app that fits well for every user and caters to a vast sect of audiences.
Hybrid applications will take the business owners one step ahead in the development game.
