We get it – it is confusing. The plethora of technologies available for your potential mobile app could be overwhelming, especially if you lack a technical bent of mind. Also, what if you are not sure what sort of an app – or even whether an app – would yield maximum results for your business? It is understandable if you do not, but it is imperative that the dev-team you hire knows the answers to these questions.
As we discuss in the dev-team post, know-how does not hurt. That is exactly what YapBuzz makes it a point to equip our clients with, even before they decide on collaborating with us. We do that simply by asking all the right questions, something which is reflective of our experience and expertise.
A lot of mobile app development company in USA will seemingly push you to take the full-bred mobile app instead of the mobile website or website/web application,, and they are not just trying to sell you their most expensive service. Understandably, any of the solutions that your product is likely to present to consumers would require access to phone-native features, be available on-the-go, carry out users’ instructions at lightning speed, and cater to their needs with considerable daily frequency. Think about cameras, sensors, notifications – any of these could be crucial to your product, in which case the native phone app is your best bet. Also, native mobile apps are significantly faster and incredibly more convenient to use than their hybrid counterparts.
However, what if the dev-team you are talking to is trying to upsell you? Perhaps you should ideally start with a hybrid app, and gradually evolve into a native one, carefully eliciting the imponderables along the way. Knowing the nitty-gritties of your product would prepare you for the talk with the dev-team.
Hybrid apps are cheaper to build and maintain. Period. This is the main point which drives clients to hybrid apps. Having a lower startup budget and being able to develop a product without spending an arm and a leg is one of the main driving factors of hybrid apps which we fully understand. It is easy for developers to sell hybrid apps to potential clients. However, if you don’t do your research properly, going the hybrid route could leave you with a very limited product in the future, one which won’t allow you to scale your business.
So what are the determiners? Here is a comprehensive overview:
- 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.
Finally, what any product – including yours – needs is reachability. Mobile apps could not only tap into a wider pool of users, but also keep them engaged to your product as they remain glued to their handheld device screens. What it all depends on is your product, and the question is what you are better off starting with. Do you go with a costlier native app codebase or a cheaper hybrid app codebase? Both come with their pros and cons and our main goal at YapBuzz is to enable our clients to take a decision which stands the test of time.
