By: The LaunchPad Lab Team / October 18, 2016
With the use of mobile devices swiftly dominating desktop, creating applications that function well on both iOS and Android phones and tablets has become the new standard. But with all these new languages and frameworks, it can become overwhelming to decide which to use.
Here at LaunchPad, we are big fans of the cross-platform mobile framework Ionic. Building in Ionic allows us to have one code base for both iOS and Android applications, and to use the web-based technologies that we know and love: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (Angular).
To dig deeper into the divide between native and hybrid apps, let’s start with some definitions.
A native app is developed for a specific operating system, such as iOS and Android. For iOS, available developing languages are Swift and Objective-C; for Android, Java or Kotlin.
A hybrid app is essentially a web app hidden behind a native shell. Platforms such as Apache Cordova allow us to wrap HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code in native code so that it can be deployed across several platforms.
It seems like building hybrid apps solves a lot of deployment, time, and resource issues, so are there benefits to developing native apps?
Here at LaunchPad, we have definitely boarded the hybrid train. The Ionic framework paired with Angular suits the vast majority of our needs and the needs of our clients. Of course there are cases, such as with high-performance 3D games requiring heavy computations, that may still be more suited to native. And because hybrid frameworks are still relatively new, there might not be the technical support available that, for example, Apple makes available for Swift programmers. However, the gap is certainly closing, and the use of hybrid frameworks, paired with a deep understanding of native code, we’ve found to be a winning combination.
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