In this post I’m going to do a simple comparison of Hybrid and Native apps. If you are going to write an application, specially for mobile phones then at some point you will definitely face this decision.So here it is:
Native Applications
Native applications are built using the tools provided by the operating system’s creators. For example applications created by Android Studio for Android, or by Visual Studio for Windows are native apps.
These type of apps are the ones recommended by Operating Systems because they are:
- Fast (as fast as the OS goes)
- Easy to debug
- Can access all resources provided by the operating systems
But they have downsides such as:
- You have to use completely different tools to create Native apps for Android, iOS, Windows etc.
- You have to even use completely different languages for each system
Hybrid Applications
These types of applications are kind of new and can be created using different tools and frameworks available in the market, such as Ionic, Famo.us or Framework7.
You would prefer writing these types of applications because:
- They are quite easy to create, you can use you HTML, JavaScript and CSS knowledge to create apps for Android, iOS, Windows etc.
But they have problems such as:
- They are slower than native apps
- Hard to debug in most cases
- Can’t access all operating system resources (in some cases you can use a combination of Hybrid and Native designs to overcome this.)