Why Native Mobile apps over Hybrid Apps?

Well, as an Android Developer one question I hear a lot from literally everybody I meet professionally is that — Why would anybody want to go for Native Application development over Hybrid application development?

Being an Android Developer for over 5 years now and also having bit knowledge on Hybrid app development, I’m qualified to share my thoughts and some researched facts on this topic.

Before we jump to conclusions for those who do not know what is Native Application development and Hybrid application development, here are some quick notes

Native Apps development:- Involves in building an application for a specific operating system separately(Android and iOS), i.e iOS developers use either Objective-C or Swift with XCode and Android developers go with either Java or Kotlin using Android Studio, IntelliJ etc

Hybrid Apps development:- Involves in building an application that works on multiple platforms using a single language and tool. Some of the common development frameworks like ReactNative, Xamarin, Ionic, or a very recent one Flutter etc are used for Hybrid apps development.

Now coming back to the argument of Native apps Vs Hybrid apps, looking at the above definitions of each, it makes pretty clear for many that hybrid apps are something that they need to go for because it has a single code base over two. But, well here are n number of reasons I want to present not to go with Hybrid but with Native application development

Advantages of Native Apps over Hybrid apps :

1. Design and User Experience :

• Hybrid apps can not really compete with the responsiveness and user experience with the native apps. Like we all know each os has its own designing principle which gives the essence to the apps, going for the hybrid development we miss this basic sense of user experience to offer to the user, which definitely, in turn, results in higher app uninstalls
• With no doubt, native application development gives the developers full control over the user experience hence results in ease of the support.
• Different architecture patterns each platform support is huge and can build a composed, modular, and strong base application which can run with greater responsiveness and experience.

2. Device-specific features :

• Although hybrid apps can have advantage on some of the device features, native apps have access to the full paraphernalia of the device features, like camera, gestures, notifications, etc, which makes it plus point to use native apps over hybrid

3. Speed :

• With no little doubt, native apps win the speed competition. If you guys remember Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg himself mentioned that choosing HTML based development for the mobile application was one of the bad choices they made, because of which they moved the application back to native development. More of this new here

4. Offline functionality :

• With the offline support with many more organized and easy to use databases being provided by each os, building the offline based application is hassle-free for native developer compared to that of hybrid developers.

5. Data Protection :

• Data security being one of the top concerns for any application, it is much easier to build a secure application using native development.

6. Performance :

• Considering the performance of any application, apps that are created and build on a specific platform can demonstrate a high level of performance over the others.
• Native apps perform fast not only because of optimization but the code itself. It works faster as it’s written in the programming language natively supported by the platform. This also allows the integration of new features much faster.

and the list goes on….

Conclusion :

Although initial time and cost are more in native application development, by offering a great user experience, better performance, and leveraging the device features, you will be able to offer your users a more personalized experience which will be rewarding in the long run.

With the extensive support over the Android and iOS platform, choosing a native application development is the wisest decision of all

P.S: For those who debate on Google’s own Flutter for the hybrid application development, it is still evolving and the level of documentation, library support, and other functionalities are yet limited in Flutter as well.

Please share your feedback on this article. What do you think is best and why?