There are a lot of apps getting released these days. Aside from building a native app (which we’ll discuss later), there are other ways we can build apps using third-party bridging technologies. These are called Hybrid apps.
So which one is cheaper to build?
Advantages (Hybrid vs Native)
The clear advantage of a native app over a hybrid is performance. Native applications can offer the best performance, highest security and best user experience. A native app is compiled into machine code, which gives the best performance you can get from the mobile phone.
On the other hand, hybrid apps can offer portability multiple platforms, cheaper initial costs and faster distribution to the market.
Another advantage for the hybrid apps is the developer community around it. Platforms such as Ionic and Xamarin have grown in popularity and therefore it has created a lot of open-source plugins which you can use within your next project.
Disadvantages (Hybrid vs Native)
Native apps are more expensive to build when aiming more than one platform. If customers desire to release constant minor updates, it will be costly. Moreover, the developers have to update the app for all the platforms individually and submit it for review again.
In hybrid apps, the performance is the greatest disadvantage. If you need to do some complex camera or sensor data manipulation or if you have to do complex UX animations, you’ll be coming across limitations of hybrid frameworks.
With Hybrid apps, though you would have lower upfront costs for simple apps, as the time goes by, you’ll have to spend more on development and maintenance. This is because hybrid apps are supported by a lot of third party software libraries and software abstraction, which requires you to spend a lot of time in keeping up with the changes and testing required.
Conclusion
It is more cost effective to build simple mobile apps using hybrid app development frameworks. Hybrid apps leverage high quality and diverse sets of libraries as well as providing the tools required to reduce the initial development time.
Hybrid apps are easier and faster to develop and deploy. However, if there are a lot of native and complicated features that are beyond the capability of the hybrid app Framework and Environment, then it will be more time consuming to build for hybrid apps.
The only benefit for choosing hybrid apps over a native is if the customer wants to build an app for all platforms faster and has a low budget to invest. That might work for small and simple apps.
However, if the app has a high level of complexity and has performance requirements, native is the way to go.
