What is a Hybrid Mobile App? | Tech tips
Hybrid mobile apps are like any other apps you’ll find on your phone.
They install on your device. You can find them in app stores. With
them, you can play games, engage your friends through social media, take
photos, track your health, and much more.
Like the websites on the internet, hybrid mobile apps are built with a combination of web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The key difference is that hybrid apps are hosted inside a native application that utilizes a mobile platform’s WebView. (You can think of the WebView as a chromeless browser window that’s typically configured to run fullscreen.) This enables them to access device capabilities such as the accelerometer, camera, contacts, and more. These are capabilities that are often restricted to access from inside mobile browsers. Furthermore, hybrid mobile apps can include native UI elements in situations where necessary.
It can be very difficult to tell how a mobile application is built. Hybrid mobile applications are no different. A well-written hybrid app shouldn’t look or behave any differently than its native equivalent. More importantly, users don’t care either way. They simply want an application that works well.
Today, most hybrid mobile applications leverage Apache Cordova, a platform that provides a consistent set of JavaScript APIs to access device capabilities through plug-ins, which are built with native code. As a side note, Apache Cordova originally started as a project named PhoneGap.
Application assets like HTML, CSS, JavaScript are packaged through the tooling made available through Apache Cordova to target platform SDKs. Once built, you have an application that can run like any other kind of application on the device. The tooling provided by Apache Cordova is largely driven through a command line interface. That stated, developers can still leverage IDEs like Visual Studio
2. Could perform 80% of native app features
3. Easy scaling across all platforms
4. More resources available to develop hybrid apps
5. Availability
6. Faster than web apps
2. Difficult to achieve native experience
3. Hardware level integration may not be easy
4. Access to native APIs can be challenging
Although Facebook has gone back to being a native app, it has let Instagram be a webview app. This is a good example of knowing your target audience and understanding what works best for the product. By going hybrid, Instagram gets the support of HTML5 that supports offline data as well as rich media, such as its signature short videos. It makes sense for a photo-sharing app to work with a technology that lets users access it even when the device is offline, or at the very least, show an error message.
Uber
Yes, Uber is a hybrid app. And a pretty awesome one at that. The mobile app
basically runs on m.uber.com which basically provides a webview on its
app. This helps the app be sleek and fast to load irrespective of the
platform. A direction that makes sense for an app with a simple aim to
rapidly connect users with drivers.
Twitter
For the amount of traffic that Twitter sees, it’s extremely surprising (or perhaps not!)
that the developers chose to build it as a hybrid. This just goes on to
show that performance is no longer an issue with the hybrid apps.
The tech world’s love for HTML5 is only growing.
Like the websites on the internet, hybrid mobile apps are built with a combination of web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The key difference is that hybrid apps are hosted inside a native application that utilizes a mobile platform’s WebView. (You can think of the WebView as a chromeless browser window that’s typically configured to run fullscreen.) This enables them to access device capabilities such as the accelerometer, camera, contacts, and more. These are capabilities that are often restricted to access from inside mobile browsers. Furthermore, hybrid mobile apps can include native UI elements in situations where necessary.
It can be very difficult to tell how a mobile application is built. Hybrid mobile applications are no different. A well-written hybrid app shouldn’t look or behave any differently than its native equivalent. More importantly, users don’t care either way. They simply want an application that works well.
How are hybrid mobile apps built?
Hybrid mobile applications are built in a similar manner as websites. Both use a combination of technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. However, instead of targeting a mobile browser, hybrid applications target a WebView hosted inside a native container. This enables them to do things like access hardware capabilities of the mobile device.Today, most hybrid mobile applications leverage Apache Cordova, a platform that provides a consistent set of JavaScript APIs to access device capabilities through plug-ins, which are built with native code. As a side note, Apache Cordova originally started as a project named PhoneGap.
Application assets like HTML, CSS, JavaScript are packaged through the tooling made available through Apache Cordova to target platform SDKs. Once built, you have an application that can run like any other kind of application on the device. The tooling provided by Apache Cordova is largely driven through a command line interface. That stated, developers can still leverage IDEs like Visual Studio
Advantage of cross platform /hybrid apps:
1. Single codebase, easy to maintain2. Could perform 80% of native app features
3. Easy scaling across all platforms
4. More resources available to develop hybrid apps
5. Availability
6. Faster than web apps
Few challenges:
1. Slow performances2. Difficult to achieve native experience
3. Hardware level integration may not be easy
4. Access to native APIs can be challenging
Some Top Hybrid Apps:
The ‘hybrid vs native’ debate has been going on for a while but Some of the topmost brands have recently ditched native and gone the
hybrid way. With the new hybrid frameworks like Ionic, Phonegap etc
becoming more mature, one cannot assume that hybrid apps perform worse
anymore.
So where are all the hybrid apps? You use them a lot, probably without
even realizing that you’re actually on “the web”. Well, that’s the
beauty of it..!!
Here are some very popular hybrid apps that you could never have imagined to be, hybrid:
Although Facebook has gone back to being a native app, it has let Instagram be a webview app. This is a good example of knowing your target audience and understanding what works best for the product. By going hybrid, Instagram gets the support of HTML5 that supports offline data as well as rich media, such as its signature short videos. It makes sense for a photo-sharing app to work with a technology that lets users access it even when the device is offline, or at the very least, show an error message.
Uber
Conclusion
Today native app development could look like more fun as there are ways to write code using tools and features like injection. But that’s not going to be the same going forward. For example, Android has already released the first binding tools to display data with having developers to write only a few configs for screen. With the growing popularity of the hybrid app, developers will need to be familiar with the hybrid environment and at least one native platform.The tech world’s love for HTML5 is only growing.
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