Native vs Web & Hybrid Apps - A Developer’s Perspective
Whether it be a social media, e-commerce, fintech, or any app, companies choose to build native mobile apps as opposed to mobile web . Not only do native mobile apps benefit from the core functionality of devices, they also offer up a better customer experience.
Here’s a few reasons, from a product development perspective, why you should consider building native mobile apps versus mobile web or a hybrid app. For the purpose of this post we’ll be using iOS as the main source of our examples.
Responsive vs Native Experiences
A native experience will give your app a lot of native basic user interface (UI) components that Apple suggest developers use to make their app look smooth. Components such as scrolling, navigation, animations or simple network calls perform much better in a native application vs a web app. Even customizing the ability for dynamic UI to your app is smoother because the processing for this is done by the device itself.
Having certain moving parts of your application built native, versus that which comes from a website, would use the processing of your mobile device rather than the processing of the website to send HTML/CSS data back to the browser to draw the response. The experience will feel more natural while using a mobile app, and users will be able to tell the difference between a mobile experience or a mobile web experience simply by load times and responsiveness to gestures. In my own experience, even browsing websites on safari can be very slow to respond to requests.
Loading Times of UI
For me, one of the bigger wins for a native mobile app is that the UI is already a part of the app download. What’s missing is the component is the data to populate it; which is generally sent over via API calls or network requests. When this data comes in, the app knows how to draw this data, and the responsiveness from your app is significantly faster due to the minimal download time required. Also, if network services are configured correctly, apps can usually request mobile only data. Mobile only data is minimal, and includes the correct image sizes to send to the device. This results in quicker load time and a better user experience without the extra data waste.
Data Management
Data management can prove vital to the overall user experience. A lot of data can be sent to the user during application launch, and stays available to the user as they request it. Apps are generally session based, and an app has a choice to store data on the device, or store data for a temporary session. This management of data can prove to be useful for user experiences when navigating the app, making the experience feel instant - avoiding load times.
Offline Experience
One of the biggest wins, and probably the most under utilized by many developers and applications, is offline experiences (no internet connectivity). Applications can support offline experiences by allowing the user to navigate and utilize the most basics of tasks,such as current view, or having parts of the app working without renewing data. It is important to indicate to the user that they are offline, and the experience will be limited but still functional. Some experiences can be visually displayed and queued for the network call once network regains.
There is a very vague idea of offline experience for the web. Once you request something by clicking a button, the browser will attempt to load that request, and then realize you have no internet. It simply does not work the same way as mobile.
A lot of the reasons why many developers and applications don’t support this offline mode is because it requires a lot of work to manage different network states “online” or “offline” and to manage incoming and queued outgoing data from and to the applications network services.
Databasing vs Efficiency in Data Provided by API
What I find to be one of the most under utilized abilities is the power to store and sort through data locally. Apps don’t use this much because there isn’t a whole lot of sorting that happens within the apps. Data is usually provided to the most accurate of knowledge by the APIs, with parameters as requested. These applications can request for data at the right time based on the user’s usage. This bit does not differ much to the users experience on the web, but noting that it can be done in a very similar manner, and perhaps more effectively.
Mobile apps can play a much greater extension than web interface, and can act as a new portal to help engage your users. However, as always, the challenge is to get users to download the app, and ensure that the experience is great enough that it merits a frequent return. That is why I believe no shortcuts should be taken in developing the best possible experience, for perhaps your most loyal customers.