Native vs Hybrid: What to choose in 2018?

One question that regularly comes to app development companies from clients is 'Should we build in Native or Hybrid?”

Hybrid Apps became very popular over the years and were a hot topic in 2016 and early 2017. However, during last year, we saw a reduction in the need of building apps in Hybrid. There were some very obvious advantages of building in Hybrid, the main one being the need to have just a common code base and hence lower build cost!

To understand this, let’s first look at why Hybrid came in existence: Hybrid Apps solved the main purpose of “One Single Source Code Base” for all platforms - be it Android, iOS, Windows or Blackberry.

That’s right, we are mentioning Windows and blackberry, as this was the main point of the argument: Hybrid became popular because there were too many platforms to build for and it made obvious sense to build in one common platform and then deploy across platforms. But with Windows and Blackberry not being around, only 2 main platforms need development now – Android and iOS.

The argument in favor of native is clear and undebatable: In technical terms, it is better to develop in Native. There are a variety of reasons to justify this statement:

• Native apps typically have better performance with rendering and animations
• Access to all native and latest APIs offered by Apple and Google
• Added advantage of using functions specific to the OS
• Best in class in-built security for a mobile app
• Responsive User Interface
• That said, Hybrid will cost much less than Native to build, as it’s only one code base. However, contrary to common thought, it is not cheaper to maintain.

Working with clients, we have realized that, with Hybrid apps, it is highly likely to get feedback around UI performance or integration of new native features offered by Apple or Google as soon as they are launched. It becomes more expensive to fix these issues and build complex features in the longer run in Hybrid.

Please note: It can be more expensive to build Hybrid first too in case you were planning to leverage some native features of the OS, for which the hybrid will need more time to develop.

Here is a quick comparison of the two:

To conclude, mobile app development companies like Grey Chain say that, when there were multiple OS environments (like Windows), it made sense to build in Hybrid. Now that there are only 2 main app development platforms (iOS and Android), it makes more sense to build in Native.

Definitions:

Hybrid Apps:

A hybrid app is a essentially a number of web views (isolated web pages) to run as an application inside of a native app by using a Native App Wrapper so that it can communicate with the OS of the device. A hybrid app requires coding only in one language, ideally html5, and then using the hybrid tools deploy it on Android and iOS both.

Native Apps:

A Native app is an app built using either Swift (on iOS) or Java (on Android), exactly in the way Apple and Google wants you to develop apps in. It allows for app to communicate natively with the respective platform.

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