



- Where does your competitor’s focus lie? Some of your competitors with rival offerings to yours deliver an average experience for users across all platforms, whereas some will create a more streamlined experience over a single system. Putting together a powerful mobile system experience for your users could likely amount to the USP of your business.
- How often would you be modifying/updating your product? Modern-day lives have been wholly organized into apps. Which means that frequent updating renders your app cumbersome. If the answer to this question is yes, you are better off investing in something hybrid/cross-platform/web-based, wherein updating one app codebase will update all platform apps.
- Is GPS a crucial part of your business? Hands-down, if you need GPS functionality in your app, you will get a better performance with native apps than hybrid apps. Also, developing on the native platform will give you more flexibility with third-party libraries which deal with GPS. Click here to read how a GPS-dependent product drew in the world as its user-base with its app.
- Do you have the budget to choose the native app over the hybrid app? Native apps need to be individually developed for iOS and Android. The programming languages for those platforms are completely separate and thus the effort is twice as much as it would take to develop the same app on an hybrid platform. And these things cost.
- Is the nature of your product such that your users will be consuming it offline? Another crucial juncture where the native app beats the hybrid. User-friendly downloadables – think maps you could download for use prior to visiting a place, and highly sophisticated dictionaries – could make or break your app. Another example is your users should be able to store data on the app even without an internet connection, and when an internet connection is available, the data should sync automatically with the server. The efficiency and scalability native apps provide in this realm cannot be matched by hybrid apps.
- Is your product analytics-heavy? An amateur round of research online would show you just how much better and more effective it is for native apps to record analytics data compared to hybrid apps.
- How much scalability should be supported? Again, with native apps, scalability is never an issue if the code is written well. With hybrid apps, scalability is often dictated by the smaller pool of plugins and libraries available to the dev team. Often even the best of dev teams become handicapped by this small pool of resources for hybrid apps and are unable to build a product which can support millions of users in the future.