With the users focus shifted from a unique idea to experience, it is the need of the hour that the app industry’s leaders and players take the cue and focus their energy on a platform that would give their users a seamless experience.
With only 10 to 12% people remaining active even after seven days of installing the app, giving them an easy experience is what determines the app lifetime on a device.
With such immense focus now on user experience, the platform out of the two – Hybrid and Native that promises a greater time is Native. Native apps promise all that we expect from our apps – reliability, quick, responsive, and noncomplex. The offerings of both can make it difficult for a company to decide which one to go with. As a cue to what to tell your mobile application development company, if you are aiming to give superior experience on an individual platform, go for Native and if delivering app quickly on all stores is what your aim is, choose Hybrid; but know that the quality will suffer.
Now before we go further in the article and discuss the level of differences you can expect with website performance, user experience, release cycles, and speed market, let us look at the best that both have to offer –
| Hybrid | Native |
| Permission to use device’s hardware and software, through plug-ins | The Native UI makes it easy for people to learn their way around the app |
| Cheap origination cost | Direct access to device software and hardware |
| Faster speed to market, initially | Better User Experience |
| One code runs on multiple platforms | Easily discoverable in app stores |
With the best of both noted, let us get down to what is best when it comes to website performance, user experience, update cycles, and speed market.
Launch Time
Usually when a company plans on launching an app, it either is trying to lead the competition or is hoping to tap a unique idea in the least possible time; either way, their aim is to launch the app in the market, ASAP. Now thinking in the short term, it’s beneficial to get the app in the market in the shortest possible time, however, in the long term app experience dominates the longevity.
Now if you have six months on you to launch the app, go for Native – because it offers the best performance and security. But if the time you have is much lower than that, go with Hybrid.
Performance of the App
The speed and performance of a Native app are much greater than that in Hybrid. Because all the contents are already available on the device and Native apps have the access to them, it is much faster to load content on it than Hybrid.
What pulls Hybrid a way back on the performance front is that it is dependent on the server speed and load bearing capacity which may fluctuate over time, making the users wait a little longer.
Update Cycle
When it comes to the frequency of updates that the users will have to do in either case, Hybrid wins the race. Until and unless you are not doing a major UI change, users need not update their app. But with Native apps, they will have to update the app to see the changes you have made.
So the frequency of updates is generally higher with Native apps as compared to their Hybrid counterparts.
Now that we have seen Native apps emerging as the clear winners, let us dwell a little more on what makes them the suitable apps.
While it is true that Hybrid apps are much easier to make and can run on multiple platforms at the same time, it is only a matter of time when companies will start seeing complaints on how the User Interface need changes or how the performance of the app is not up to the mark. So even though Hybrid is seemingly the ideal solution in the short run, in the long run, it is the experience that would count – one that only Native can offer.
