Native vs Mobile Web development

Anuoluwapo Onifade
Aug 22, 2017 · 3 min read

How important is speed and performance to you? — Since native apps work with the device’s built-in features, they are easier to work with and also perform faster on the device.
Using a messaging app as an example, it runs background processes and customised settings, in order to be both “always running” and “light on memory and battery”. Native is your best bet for this, and that’s why Facebook messenger was built on React-Native which is in turn converted to native codes rather than Mobile web like vanilla javascript using Cordova or Phonegap. Also, if you want to build apps that consume a lot of the Media Player API, these kind of apps demand GPU processing, background processing, multi-threaded programming, async programming, device controlling capabilities and Open Graphics Library(OpenGL). Native is your best bet.
It’s also easier to use the latest API’s on Android or iOS on Native than mobile web — so if you have plans to use the most up-to-date API on either Android or iOS, Native is your best bet.

Would you like to monetize with your app? — it’s easier to monetize apps in native than in mobile web.

The main thing you should know is that mobile web is still in its formative years, and would still need more time to get so mature and robust like the natives. If you want an app similar in looks on any platform with almost the same UX or you want to share as much code as possible so you can iterate faster and ship to the market in lesser time, mobile web is your guy.
These apps are usually Social apps or E-commerce apps like. So you can see that mobile web apps are not useless. And you won’t be wasting your time learning it. Also because mobile web supports Javascript, HTML and CSS, it can easily be ported into any mobile device. Therefore, when you need to deploy application faster to multiple mobile platform, you might want to look into mobile web. It’s support for HTML5, Javascript and CSS makes it easy to develop a better user experience and easy customisation.

The summary of this is that there is a trade-off. If functionality e.g speed is more important and you will be consuming a lot of device’s resources, then native is the way to go but if you are so interested in UX and the application will not be consuming a lot of resources in the device, then mobile web development is the way to go as it gives room for easy customisation. Meanwhile, mobile web developments are limited because plugins to consume internal resources still have to be written with native languages.

Differences between Native vs Mobile Web development

  1. Native app are developed for specific platform i.e. Android native app cannot work for IOS. You will need to develop a something new if you need to use the same application on a different mobile device. Mobile web app is cross platform i.e. the same application can be deployed to different mobile platform with little or no changes.
  2. Because native app are built specifically for the platform, it makes native apps faster than a mobile web app.
  3. Native apps are installed directly on the device while mobile web app uses the web browser.

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