Build Future-Ready Scalable Apps for Your Business: Go Hybrid

Ok, so you have a great mobile app idea for your business that you want to execute.

What’s the next step in the process?

Deciding on your mobile app development platform, of course!

And while there are many mobile app development platforms out there, hybrid mobile apps are drawing a lot of attention lately due to their adaptability and consistent performance.

Hybrid apps offer a perfect blend of both native and web features that enable businesses to engage their audiences irrespective of the platform they use.

In this blog post, we will dive deeper into hybrid mobile apps and the key reasons why you should consider them for your business.

What Are Hybrid Apps?

Hybrid mobile apps are essentially web apps with additional native features. These apps are accessible via native web browsers of all compatible smartphones and can also be installed on the device like native apps.

Hybrid apps facilitate smooth interactions between the app interface and device hardware to deliver native-like consistent experiences across multiple platforms.

They are deployed in a native container that uses a mobile WebView object. When the app is used, this object displays web content using web technologies like CSS, JavaScript, and HTML. Hence, they are essentially displaying a web page that is adapted to a WebView display.

Why Choose a Hybrid Mobile App for Your Business?

Hybrid mobile apps follow a write once-and-run everywhere approach to coding. It combines the best of web-based and native apps in one cross-platform codebase which is compatible with various operating systems – iOS and Android.

They even allow you to leverage different plugins to easily access native device features like the camera, face ID, fingerprint, and more to deliver a seamless customer experience.

From a business point of view, this means hybrid apps are a cheaper and easier option to expand your digital presence. Their single codebase reduces the development time significantly, thus, resulting in a faster time to market too.

Key Benefits of Hybrid App Development

Hybrid app development is one of the most sought-after approaches to building mobile apps today. Let’s take a look at its major advantages.

Enhanced UI/UX

Hybrid apps are increasingly responsive and lightweight, which helps load the content and graphics quickly. They offer a consistent and flawless user experience across iOS and Android platforms.

Wider Market Reach

In today’s competitive landscape, meeting your audience where they are is key to digital success. Hybrid apps let you target different platforms with a single solution. You can reach and engage with a sizeable audience of both Android and iOS platforms easily.

High Performance

Hybrid apps have no dependency on network communication which helps them offer high speed and performance. They can easily handle a large number of users and can sometimes even deliver better performance than progressive web apps.

Cost Effective

The budget is a major determinant of any development project. Fortunately, hybrid mobile apps are more budget-friendly for businesses than their native counterparts. Their unified development saves you multiple investments in different app versions, thus, reducing the cost.

Easier to Maintain

Hybrid apps require simple maintenance. By eliminating versioning, they help you avoid rolling out new versions for every platform with each update. This makes hybrid app management as simple as updating a web page.

Offline Availability

Hybrid mobile apps also come with an offline connectivity feature that lets users have uninterrupted access to the app’s data without any performance glitches.

Shorter and Scalable Development Phase

As hybrid apps do not have platform dependency, the development time is shortened with easy-to-accomplish modules. Also, unlike native apps, they don’t require specific development for every different feature and resolution.

Popular Hybrid Mobile App Development Frameworks

Now that we know the basics and benefits of hybrid apps for businesses, let’s discuss some of the popular frameworks for their development.

React Native

React Native is one of the topmost choices of development frameworks for building hybrid mobile applications. React Native comes with a host of advanced features such as code reusability, live reload, native plug-ins, and more to create high-performance cross-platform apps with a native look and feel.

Ionic

Ionic is a completely free and open-source SDK for hybrid mobile app development. It offers an extensive set of tools and features, including the Ionicons icon pack, deep linking, AoT Compiling, and a custom animations API. It is framework-agnostic and has official support for React, Angular, Vue, and Preact to build robust apps that render beautifully on every device and screen size.

Flutter

Powered by Google, Flutter is an open-source framework known for its speed and reliability to build interactive hybrid applications. It has a rich collection of tools, widgets, and SDKs to create portable, strong, and fast apps that can be further integrated with other technologies like smart TV, appliances, and cars.

Xamarin

Xamarin is a Microsoft-owned hybrid mobile app development framework. With a C# shared codebase, it is used to write native Android, iOS, and Windows apps with native user interfaces. You can create universal apps in lesser time by re-utilizing Xamarin’s tools and abilities.

Examples of Hybrid Apps

Given the high performance and functionality of hybrid apps, they are adopted by many giants in the digital market, including:

• Gmail
• Evernote
• Twitter
• Instagram
• Uber
• Apple App Store
• Amazon App Store

To Wrap Up

A majority of businesses are now turning their focus to mobile applications to expand their digital presence. And with their high versatility and lower costs, hybrid app development presents itself as an effective solution to building applications that last longer, deliver better, and perform faster.

Interested in Learning More About Hybrid Mobile App Development for Your Business? Book a Free Consultation.