Native Vs Phone gap mobile app development — Which is best for eCommerce store
Today, it is not only important for businesses to reach out to their target customers, but also essential to deliver them the best customer experience as well. Building a mobile app is not a hard task as there are a number of app development frameworks and developers accessible to you. Yet, if you are planning to go the extra mile in terms of customer experience then you need to find the right ecommerce mobile app development service provider that suits your specific needs.
The debate about the pros and cons of differing approaches to mobile app development is a never ending process. Each approach — native, phone gap or hybrid — has its own benefits and disadvantages and an organization needs to choose the apt mobile app development approach that suits its resources and the goals.
What are Native Applications?
A native mobile app is a smartphone application that is coded in a specific programming language, such as Objective C for iOS and Java for Android operating systems (OS). Native mobile apps offer fast performance and have a high degree of reliability. Also, they have access to a phone’s various devices like its camera and address book. Yet, the native app is expensive to develop, because it is tied to one type of operating system.
Advantages of Native app
The native apps are built using the native platform interface components and follows platform UI guidelines. Hence, they appear as natural extensions of the platform, which offers a visually seamless user experience. As the UI guidelines include conventions regarding app behavior, the user’s interactions and manipulation of the app will be smooth and easy to comprehend.
The native apps, by definition, should have full access to the platform APIs and should have direct access to all platform-specific capabilities that includes embedded hardware, peripherals and specialized UI libraries or components. Also, native apps can directly access a Smartphone’s GPS, USB, cameras and networking hardware.
The native applications that are written using the platform-standard languages and toolkits attain the highest possible runtime performance, because they are compiled to run directly on the hardware without intervening abstraction layers.
From the point of view of a user, the native applications generally appear to be more responsive, reliable and behave in accordance with other native apps on the device. Furthermore, more memory and hardware-acceleration are accessible to native applications. Also, they have the potential to communicate with other native apps installed on the device, in case programmed to do so.
What are Phone Gap apps?
Phone Gap is an open source framework which is extensively used for developing cross-platform mobile applications. The developers use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for building innovative and rich apps. The Phone Gap is ideal for mobile app developers who would like to start with mobile application development and can use their existing skills on a common platform instead of a device-specific compiled language. The Phone Gap app can easily be connected to the mobile device hardware and other tools such as the Accelerometer or GPS. Phone Gap applications can be built and developed similar to native applications. The encouraging aspect is that the developed apps can find a place even in the Andriod and App Store.
Advantages of Phone Gap app
One of the main features of developing mobile application using the Phone Gap platform is the Portability, which means an application developed for Android can be easily ported to other mobile platforms like Windows mobile by transferring the code. Thus, cross-platform code can work for all mobile platforms such as Android, iOS or Windows;
A Phone Gap app is capable of ensuring a native and uniform digital experience to users across diverse devices they use. Also, it has a rich repository of plugins needed to add platform-specific functionalities to an app. The Phone Gap app plugins enable to take advantage of the device’s features such as accelerometer, camera, compass, file system, microphone etc that helps to add value to the app. Being an open source app development framework, accessible under Apache Cordova, Version 2.0, the Phone Gap keeps on getting advanced plug-ins as well as updates from its growing community members.
Conclusion
The PhoneGap platform is ideally suited for developing simple mobile apps that do not make use of the native features of phone extensively. In case you intend to develop a more complex app that requires extensive usage of phone features, then native app development is recommended. Whether you opt for a native app or Phone Gap app will greatly depend on your specific requirements, core expertise, budget, and availability of resources.