We wrote a hybrid app and it got featured in the app store
Recently, we helped one of our clients to develop a mobile app called 撲水 Water For Free. 撲水 Water For Free collects all the locations of water fountains throughout Hong Kong to help users to refill their water bottles while on the go. Let’s work together to reduce the millions of beverage bottles entering our landfills every day.



The app is a hybrid app and it’s developed using Apache Cordova and Ionic Framework 3. Hybrid app is essentially a web app written in Javascript, HTML and CSS that can be downloaded and installed via the app store, and it’s built with native integration, i.e. Camera, GPS, Push Notification.

Why hybrid instead of native?
Development for hybrid apps often requires less time and effort, hence it’s less expensive than a native app. Hybrid apps are also easier to scale to another platform. Once we built for iOS, we can launch on another like Android instantly with just some minor style adjustment.
It also retains the same ability to access device features as with native apps, thanks to solutions like Apache Cordova that act as a bridge between the native SDK and the webview in which the hybrid app runs.
Disadvantages?
Of course, nothing is perfect, performance is probably the biggest disadvantage. Since hybrid apps actually run in a browser-like environment called webview, hybrid apps performance depends on the performance of the webview.
Thankfully, the performance of recent mobile devices has increased tenfold. Devices like iPhone 6S and Samsung Galaxy S7 have an excellent and powerful webview. For iOS, new OS component like WKWebView allows hybrid apps to run very very fast, even a professional cannot easily differentiate a hybrid app with a native app.

Sounds good, but I heard hybrid apps cannot be submitted in app store…
Come on, it’s the year 2017, you can submit a hybrid app just like a regular native app. As a matter of fact, 撲水 Water For Free made it to the app store top 80 downloads list, it also got featured on the app store home page! I would say if your app is really good and useful, no one, not even Apple, cares if it’s a hybrid or native app.

If you are interested in building a hybrid app, feel free to contact us!
Originally published at playa.hk.
