Native vs. Hybrid: Which Is Best For Enterprise Mobile App Development?

According to a recent study from Gartner, 73% of enterprise organizations are engaged in mobile app development, up from 60% just a year ago. It’s easy to see why organizations embrace mobile: mobile devices are everywhere, nearly 80% of adults own a smartphone.

Mobile applications also give organizations an opportunity to modernize and simplify applications. Many enterprise mobile apps are tightly focused on a limited range of features; the HR department may have an app just for planning employee vacations. These apps integrate with the company’s databases, but they’re a far cry from the complex and bloated “enterprise applications” of old.

When most of us think of mobile applications, what comes to mind is the native mobile app, an application developed in a language native to the platform. But that’s not the only option. Native applications are one end of a spectrum that also includes hybrid applications and web applications.

Native Applications

Native applications are written in the native languages of the platform: for Android that’s Java and for iOS it’s Objective-C or Swift.

Native applications offer the best performance and they have full access to all the hardware on the devices on which they run. But native apps are probably the most complex and time-consuming to build, especially if your organization doesn’t have an existing expertise in native app development. Custom apps will have to be created for each platform, with separate codebases and all the management headaches that entails.

Web Applications

A web application is just what you think it is, an application loaded from the web that runs in a browser. Web application frontends are written in HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS. Their backends are written in any of dozens of programming languages.

Web applications run on any device with a modern browser. That means you develop once, and the application runs anywhere.

With modern Web APIs, web applications can be quite functional and can access some of the device’s hardware features, including the camera. But web applications have one big problem: they offer poor performance compared to native applications. Everything a web application needs has to be downloaded from the web, and the browser environment isn’t nearly as well optimized for performance as native code.

Hybrid Apps

Hybrid apps straddle the line between native and web. They’re created using the same web technologies as web apps, they’re cross platform, and they run in a simplified chromeless browser called a WebView. But hybrid apps have access to the majority of the device’s native features via a bridging solution like Apache Cordova or PhoneGap, a Cordova distribution from Adobe.

Hybrid applications are particularly popular with enterprise organizations because they allow for rapid application development and a codebase that works well across most modern devices, while being able to overcome many of the disadvantages of web applications.

Hybrid apps don’t offer the same performance as native applications, but for most enterprise purposes, that’s less of a concern than speed and cost of development, which can be substantially lower.

Whether you choose native, web, or hybrid depends on the specific requirements of your business and users, but in many cases, a hybrid app is an excellent choice.

However you develop your mobile applications, make sure you host the backend on a reliable public or private cloud platform or bare metal servers for the best performance and availability.