Choosing the Right Mobile App Development Approach for Your Business
Executive Summary
As smartphones are increasingly turning in to the central platform for broader digital experience, business leaders are bringing in unique ideas to build customer engaging mobile apps. But to create a high performing, user-friendly and cost-effective application, it is necessary to follow a strategic approach. This whitepaper can help you choose the right mobile app development approach for the four most broadly used types of applications in the market.
- Native Mobile Applications — that provide high performance and excellent user experiences.
- Hybrid Mobile Applications — a native foundation with web-based flexibility
- Progressive Web Applications — business agility with improving standards for functionality
- Responsive Web Design — universal web solutions that centralize business functions
Whitepaper : Choosing the Right Mobile App Development Approach for Your Business
In 2018, the smartphone became the central platform to users’ broader digital experiences that span many devices. As the core technology in those digital ecosystems, mobile has become a focal point for companies who invest in application development as a key strategy for empowering business users and customers. A high performance, cost-effective, capable, and user-friendly mobile experience has never been more important to business and consumer economies.
As such, business leaders must analyze and understand the different types of mobile applications present in the market — namely, native, hybrid, and progressive web applications (PWA), as well as mobile-responsive websites. This report takes aim at understanding the purpose, advantages, and disadvantages of each of these approaches to mobile development.
Mobile App Development: 4 Tips To Consider
Four Approaches to Your Mobile Application Strategy
As companies approach their strategy for mobile application development, they must reflect on business needs and development capabilities before determining how and on which framework their mobile solutions will run. They will face certain tradeoffs upon selecting a strategy — we’ll review the advantages of disadvantages in terms of cost, performance, capability, and usability for each.
Native Mobile Applications: Platform Exclusivity With Exceptional Performance
Native applications are perhaps the ‘purest’ in that they are intimately tied to the platform on which they are running — be it an Android OS, Microsoft, or iOS, each on their respective devices. Much like most applications on a desktop, they are entirely executed upon the hardware on which they reside. Native apps fully integrate with the capabilities of both devices and their operating systems, allowing developers to leverage those capabilities in appropriate business cases.
For this reason, native mobile apps provide high performance and excellent user experiences — they can be developed specifically for their environments, with superior runtime optimizations. They require no intermediaries or abstractions. They have wider access to their APIs and mobile device features without limitations on their usage. This is especially advantageous when platform features enhance the capabilities of the applications, which may include unique security features and functionalities even when running in offline mode.
For users, native apps can be downloaded directly from their associated app stores, so they are always available to customers and business users. Since native apps directly access the UI components of their platforms, they blend with their operating environments for seamless UI experiences.
These benefits may come at a cost to developers. Since native apps are exclusive to their platforms and operating systems, developers have the often-tedious responsibility of rewriting an entire codebase for each platform and user type — even when the multiple versions have the same purpose. What’s more, capabilities across devices may differ, which can hinder developers from implementing the same optimized features from platform to platform.
Even after executing different app versions across multiple environments, developers must also manage the fragmented maintenance and updating requirements of their solutions. That means twice the effort or more in keeping the solution competitive. Business stakeholders who want the advantages of native should consider investing in a third-party native development software development kit (SDK) that minimizes code writing to a single instance while applying native capabilities across platforms — even if it requires a higher initial investment.
Top Technologies Used to Develop Mobile App
Hybrid Mobile Applications: A Native Foundation With Web-Based Flexibility
Developers turn to hybrid applications to leverage both native libraries and web technologies to achieve superior performance across devices. Partly a native app, hybrid apps also render and process multi-platform web technologies locally. With the high-performance benefits of native apps in mind, incorporating web technologies can provide the advantages of native apps without the unwieldy development, maintenance, and optimization requirements of native application development alone. Since the web-based partition of hybrid apps needs only a single codebase for all platforms, developers can centrally manage and update features even if some devices do not support them as native functionalities.
With hybrid apps, there are no inherent barriers to achieving the same high functionality found in native apps. Truly, achieving this degree of performance is behind the argument of creating a native component in the first place. Developers can optimize the native portion of the app on each respective platform, and streamline web-based technologies to interact across platforms. The ways in which developers partition the native and web-based portion of the app will determine this quality.
Still, hybrid apps cannot exceed the maximum performance, speed, and optimization of native apps, simply because web-based technologies are dependent on the web connectivity of any given device — not the device’s hardware or embedded OS alone.
Business stakeholders may find cost savings in hybrid applications versus native application development. Stakeholders must balance the higher-cost, higher-functionality benefits of the native component with the lower-cost, broader-functionality benefits of the web-based component, even while optimizing UI and the cost to update, improve, and maintain the overall solution over its lifetime.
Progressive Web Applications (PWAs): Business Agility With Improving Standards for Functionality
Web-based mobile apps may execute on a device the same way as a native or hybrid app, but they have highly different development environments dictating their capabilities. Since they are executed in a web browser instead of on the device’s OS, they have a key advantage — developers needn’t create a unique version of the app for each mobile platform, so long as they are compatible with each device’s rendering engine. With some limited access to mobile hardware, web applications can adapt and resize to each OS environment accordingly.
For any given business need, these apps are typically the least costly to develop, maintain, update, and improve. Nearly all web applications can be written in one language and executed across any device. Developers maintain full control over update cycles and still access more device features than via a traditional website.
Needless to say, performance is a key disadvantage for web-based applications versus native or hybrid. Traditional web applications have libraries that must be accessed via abstraction layers to execute on their capabilities — they are a step removed from a device’s hardware and OS, and may also be impacted by network latency. They will almost always lack in their UI performance when compared to these other application development frameworks as well.
Still, the performance gap is shrinking thanks to new developments in progressive web applications. These apps maximize offline execution while accessing mobile websites exclusively designed for app rendering, increasing UI performance. This new development approach and recent mobile hardware and OS advances increasingly enable these applications to access hardware-specific functions — such as facial recognition or functionalities associated with other applications and files.
Responsive Web Design: Universal Web Solutions That Centralize Business Functions
Responsive websites are individual web entities that nonetheless adapt to the browsers and systems by which they are accessed. They adjust their functionalities and design elements — instantly and optimally — to accommodate any browser window, supporting access from any environment even while maintaining the same channel for user interaction and data transfer.
Much like web-based applications, these solutions require only one coding instance with one additional business benefit — channel integration with desktop and other internet-connected interfaces. In other words, PC users will access the same website as mobile users, centralizing all business-critical information in one environment. Needless to say, this is highly advantageous for companies with stakes in the protection, optimization, and centralization of consumers’ and business users’ data.
Responsive users may encounter additional load time depending on their devices and connectivity. However, every user will experience the same functionality — especially advantageous when users access business channels via multiple personal devices. From a design perspective, responsive websites require a bold vision of how development can achieve consistency, rich features, and high performance across environments.
Both developers and business stakeholders must also have deep knowledge of their users and their specific needs, then reconcile those with responsive capabilities — that is, capabilities that must perform well and uniformly in multiple digital environments. Developers and users alike may become frustrated when image resolutions, advertisements, functionalities, download times, and other features lack consistency across devices, creating a less seamless user experience. Still — and much like hybrid or progressive web applications — responsive design is SEO friendly and easier to update, offering developers more opportunities to improve their design without substantial disruption or added costs.
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Conclusion
Stakeholders and developers must consider their specific business goals before selecting a mobile application development strategy, and each approach should address those goals in a unique way. While responsive, PWA, and hybrid applications may lend themselves to a wider user base and more cost-effective updates and support, users will form their acceptance of those applications based on efficacy and usability, not the aspects that are most beneficial to the stakeholders and developers themselves. No matter their approach, stakeholders and developers must adopt specific advantages and disadvantages and determine the degree to which each will affect the overall success of their investment — both financially and in terms of user acceptance.
Stakeholders must also consult with internal application development professionals or partners to determine which approach represents their best long-term investment, as certain approaches have more capacity for advancements than others. As we’ve discussed, progressive web applications are already agile and cost-effective — stakeholders must take their increasing capacity for incorporating desirable features, integrating with hardware capabilities, and improving performance record into account. A native application development approach might be best for a unique business case today; but as users’ need for connectivity and agile software solutions evolve, stakeholders would be wise to consider the long-term strategic potential of a mobile application development methodology as well.
Author Bio:
Vinod has conceptualized and delivered niche mobility products that cater to various domains including logistics, media & non-profits. He leads, mentors & coaches a team of Project Coordinators & Analysts at Fingent, a custom software development company.
