Introduction Of Mobile App Development
Nowadays we are living in a smartphone era, where smartphone has become an integral part of our daily lives.
Waking up with a morning alarm, using Whatsapp, checking emails, reading news, watching videos and so on, everything is seamlessly executed from mobile apps installed on our mobile devices and that is the reason why today mobile technology has proved to be the biggest boon for humanity.
Hence, the use of smartphones and mobile applications has grown extremely over the last decade and it is likely that it’ll continue to do so.
According to the report of statista, world’s total population is 7.7 Billions out of this 2.7 Billions people are having smartphones till May,2019. You can clearly see that in the year of 2014, Number of smartphone users are 1.57 Billions and in the year of 2019, 2.7 billion people uses smartphones which are almost doubled in just 5 years.
However, with the remarkable growth of mobile app industry the “native vs. cross-platform” app development debate is also blowing.
If we talk about some recent fact figures,In 2017, Android and iOS, held a market share of 85.1% and 14.8% respectively. As of March 2018, there were 3.8 million apps in Google Play (for Android) and 2 million in Apple’s App Store (for iOS).
So by seeing this fact figures, various questions arise in our mind
In this article, you will get a complete answer to all questions where we will talk about the advantages and benefits of developing mobile app with a cross platform technologies over native platform.
Advantages Of Mobile Application
As consumer behaviour continues to evolve, businesses need to adapt their strategy to be ‘where their customers are’. Here are some of the biggest benefits of Mobile Applications for your business:
1. To Build Customer Loyalty
To develop business apps is a very important when it comes to building customer loyalty, just because the majority of business owners found it very tricky and critical when it comes to marketing a business.
But while having a business apps it becomes very easy for a business owner to develop a connection between the customer and the brand through constant reminders and notifications. These reminders create awareness about the products and services that are offered and encourage the customers to make a purchase.
2. Increase Visibility
Research reveals that a person spend on an average around 170 minutes on his/her smartphones everyday to browse a handful of applications. Also most of the people prefer to search for apps on mobile while they are traveling, socialising, waiting for appointments and also during leisure time and if at that time having your app “in the way” of scrolling, will not just increase your business visibility but will literally help your business to grow.
3. Increase Customer Engagement
The main motto to build mobile application is to seamlessly connect and interact with customers and increase the level of accessibility with your customers.
Also the customer loves quick solution of their problems and with the help of mobile apps it becomes easy for customers to quickly connect them to businesses they most commonly want or need and as a result it increases customer satisfaction.
4. Build Up Your Brand & Perception
By having mobile apps for your business will extensively helps you in creating your brand awareness. You can do whatever you want with your app to make it stylish, hip, functional, shocking, or informative and most important to do is to create an app that has features your customers will love.The more often you can get customers involved with your app, the sooner they will be tending to buy your product and/or service.
5. Best Marketing Tool
Enter your Mobile Application is your next marketing tool after website. You can add rewards and loyalty programs are proven tools to keep users engaged with your app and business. Research says that customer open pop-up notifications of mobile apps more than an Email. You can use pop-up Advertising, notifications and reminders, which provide extra benefits to your mobile users.
6. Improve Productivity
Mobile Apps improve your staff’s productivity because managing task in the mobile app is more easy in comparison to desktop or laptop. Mobile Application help to boost the capabilities of the field person as they can enter data anytime and anywhere with the use of their mobile.
7. Accelerate Profit
increase in customer satisfaction will directly increase in sales and that in result increase in profit of your business.That’s where the mobile app comes in. If you launch a mobile app in addition to your responsive website, you’ll boost sales while enhancing the customer experience.
Do you know? Domino’s Pizza online ordering contributed 51% to delivery sales for the quarter ended March 31, 2017. And out of this, 68% of online orders were placed via mobile app.
So because of the growing craze and plenty of benefits(that we have seen above) that the apps offer, almost all the brands are developing their own app.
Though everyone is using apps, only a few now that all the apps they are using are not the same. The mobile apps are broadly categorised into 3 categories (Native,Hybrid & Web) which I have described below.
Types Of Mobile Applications
1. Native Mobile Application
2. Web Application
3. Cross Platform (Hybrid) Mobile Application
What is Native Mobile Application?
Native apps are developed to target one specific platform like Android, iOS or Windows. You need to develop an application which support any single operating system which means you need to develop different applications for the android, iOS, and Windows device users.
Native apps are written in platform-specific programming languages (Kotlin or Java for Android, and Objective-C or Swift for iOS) and can be downloaded from the related app store (App store for iOS and Google Play Store for Android). They cannot run cross-platform and can take the best use of device native features like GPS, Camera, Contacts, etc.
- Advantages
- Disadvantages
What is a Web Application? (Web Apps)
Web applications are not the real applications but they are a websites which has similar kind of look & feel like a native application. Web apps use browser and internet to run. You can view a mobile web app on Android, iOS or Windows tablets and phone devices. They also work on PC web browsers. Softwares' used to develop these applications are generally in HTML, CSS, Javascript, JQuery. These kind of applications provide URLs and redirect to the login page to the users.
- Advantages
- Disadvantages
What is Hybrid (Cross-Platform) Mobile Application?
As we are living in a smartphone era, where there are different mobile platforms and devices like mobile phones, tablet, laptop, desktop, etc… are available. These devices differ in their hardware designs, navigation, and styles. To speed up the task of developing apps, there are some tools available that allow you to build a single app that can run on different platforms. They are known as hybrid (cross-platform) mobile application.
Hybrid application supports multiple platforms and web technologies like HTML5, CSS and Javascript , this applications are main web apps which are molded for respective platforms like iOS and Android. These applications are developed very fast which support multiple platforms without a break and accurate navigation for users.
In Short Hybrid = Different technologies used to create a single version across different types of devices.
- Advantages
- Disadvantages
So far you have read all the 3 types of mobile app with their own benefits and drawbacks and this had kept your mind in more confusion state to choose & decide the type of app for your next mobile application, right?
Second thing is, I also often get some tricky questions from our clients whether do we need to go with Native app or hybrid app technology?
So if you are also encountering the same situation, below I have mentioned a few important factors that can help you out to decide about the right app type for your next mobile application development.
HOW TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT APP TYPE?
All the three types of mobile apps have their own benefits and drawbacks. This makes the decision of choosing one for the next application development even more complicated, right?
However, if you are also encountering the same situation, here are a few factors that can help you out:
Speed and Performance: Since native apps can better employ the native device features, they offer higher speed and performance.
App Complexity and Functionalities: If your app is going to be highly dependent on the built-in device features, native app development is the ultimate solution. However, if your app does not demand support for complex and high-end functionality, you can choose Hybrid as well.
Time: When it comes to reaching both iOS and Android platform at the earliest, hybrid app development is a better choice as it allows you to design for one, but launch on all mobile platforms.
Budget: Again, hybrid allows you to build an application for a single platform while accessing it at all. This reduced the mobile app development cost for different platforms individually.
Target audience: If your end users are using devices running on the same platform, then prefer native. Otherwise, choosing web or hybrid application will be profitable as it will let you reach more audience without investing in developing an app for different platforms individually.
Difference Between
Native, Web & Hybrid App
The variety of mobile apps is extensive, which makes it challenging to identify the one that is a perfect fit for your business requirements.
So below I have explained the main difference between native platform, web platform and cross (hybrid) platform.
With this you will get even more confidence in identifying the one that is a perfect fit for your business requirements.
By reviewing the above mentioned differences we can conclude that Hybrid applications may be the next big thing but making one is a decision you should take keeping in mind all its pros and cons.
If you are still not convinced consult a team of experts who can guide you in the right direction.
List of Popular Cross Platform Frameworks
Let’s have a look at some of the most popular mobile app development frameworks that will become major tools in 2020.
In this section, you’ll learn about the following frameworks:
1. IONIC Mobile App Development:
IONIC released in the year 2013 by developers of drifty Co. IONIC is the complete open source software development Kit (SDK) which help to develop cross-platform (Hybrid) mobile apps. IONIC provide development tools and services to develop hybrid mobile app,desktop, and progressive web app.
It provides tools and services for building Mobile UI with native look and feel. Ionic framework needs native wrapper to be able to run on mobile devices.
Ionic’s main advantage is that it is for hybrid apps so you can build application for Android, iOS, Windows devices which saves your time. Developer’s work is very easy in starting phase of development because Ionic provide pregenerated app setup and simple layout. Ionic is a very useful platform for uploading, sharing, and testing your application on native devices.
App testing is the main disadvantages of Ionic because browser doesn’t give the right information about the phone environment so you have to test your application on different devices.
2. React Native Mobile App Development:
React Native is a fairly new and emerging open source framework from Facebook that promises a “learn once, write everywhere” experience, using JavaScript as it’s main code. It enables quick prototyping and a very high initial velocity. Its basic features are also fairly easy to learn and implement.
It can also be extended with native code and native views. However, JavaScript code isn’t as efficient for calculation-intensive tasks and there’s an overhead when JavaScript is controlling native elements.
3. Xamarin Mobile App Development:
Xamarin is a Microsoft-owned software company. With C# codebase, you can develop Android, iOS and Windows apps. If you are a developer who wants to use C# or ruby, then xamarin is a perfect cross-platform for you. You can design native apps for multiple platforms using just C# codes base only that you can do in Objective-C, Swift or Java unlike what is commonly believed. You can use the same IDE, language, and APIs everywhere. Testing for potential bugs is easier as you can run it on over 1,000 devices. No doubt why big Companies like Microsoft, IBM, Foursquare, and Dow Jones are using it.
One of xamarin’s best features is that it allows code sharing in multiple platforms (cross platform mobile app development). Xamarin also has a cloud service, which allows you to test on any number of devices.
Cons: using xamarin, it does have some compatibility issues means you won’t be capable of using numerous open-source libraries for iOS and Android development. The free version is not so good for the substantial project as it’s seriously limited.
4. Adobe Phonegap (Apache Cordova) (2009)
PhoneGap is one of the top options to use if you’re building an app for the first time as a developer because this cross-platform development tool is that it’s free to use. An adobe's product, that can be used to develop hybrid apps using popular web technologies (HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript). It lets you deploy a single code base to different platforms including iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Firefox OS and more. It reuses existing frameworks, tools, and web development skills and hence significantly lower your development time. Getting ready for app stores is also possible using PhoneGap.
Cons: The only limitation in this tool is, it's a poor performance for graphics-intensive apps. Though you may easily find plugins as per requirements, they could be somewhat outdated or unsupported based on the targeted platform.
5. Flutter App Development
Flutter is an open-sourced mobile application development framework created by google. Instead of using wrapper of native framework, Flutter actually draws the UI from scratch which provide best user experience. Flutter is not a technology it just a software development kit.Flutter is cross platform mobile application development platform that's why you don't need to develop mobile applications for android and ioS devices separately, you just need to build one codebase for both platforms. Flutter is based on DART language which is easy to learn for developers. Flutter is so easy to create your own widgets or customised existing widgets.
Flutter apps disadvantage is that it is not supported by web browsers means you can develop android and iOS Application but you can’t develop web application. mobile application’s APK size also bigger in the flutter. another disadvantage of flutter is developers don't have much libraries to use instead of this they have to create new libraries by their own.
Friendly Opinion
Thus, we come to the conclusion that mobile apps have become the most convenient source of contact between businesses and customers. But when it comes to choosing the best platform to create the ultimate mobile apps, there are many options available. The best way is to have a ground plan and seek the help of a mobile app development company like ours that offers complete app development as per your requirement.
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