In the modern world, it is difficult to imagine a mobile device that does not have a single application. But what is a mobile app and what are its specific features?
They have firmly entered our lives almost simultaneously with tablets and smartphones. Therefore, the growth of this direction is rapid. Nowadays it has almost captured the market. The need to develop a mobile application is more and more actual. And ios mobile app development company is ready to carry out this task.
A mobile application is a program, developed for tablets and smartphones up to the request. It is installed on a particular platform and has certain functionality. It’s able to perform certain actions. Also, it’s able to solve a given range of issues.
What is a mobile application?
More recently, mobile applications were only games. But very quickly, entrepreneurs realized that an app could help run a business. And also become a powerful marketing tool with which you can increase awareness and trust in your brand. You can conduct advertising campaigns, and simplify customer feedback.
In order to develop a mobile application, you first need to understand what types are there? How do they differ from each other? And what are the benefits?
Key mobile app development technologies
Hundreds of mobile applications are created every day to make working with a mobile device more comfortable. There are several types of applications. Depending on what the applications are aimed at, there are:
Native applications
This is the most common type of smartphone applications development. For the user, applications that require installation are native. In general, this is true, as well as the fact that such applications are developed specifically for mobile platforms (iOS, Android, Windows Phone). Therefore, the developer is required to have programming skills in a specific development environment (xCode for iOS, eclipse for Android).
As a result, it gives a pleasant appearance and smooth interaction of the application with the mobile OS. The native app is also far ahead of both the hybrid and the web app when it comes to security. These applications with the least resource consumption use the camera, microphone, accelerometer, player and other functions. Conventionally, a native application can be divided into two groups: applications that require an Internet connection, and offline applications.
Web apps are different from native apps
Using a regular website on a smartphone is at best inconvenient, at worst – the layout of the site falls apart, and after that it is completely impossible to work with it. For this purpose, web applications are created in order to use the site from the phone. So, in essence, this is the same site optimized for mobile devices. Unlike a native app, you don’t need to install web apps – they run in your phone’s browser. Therefore, absolutely nothing depends on the phone model (on the mobile platform, to be more precise). Also, regardless of the platform, web applications cannot work with the native functions of the phone.
Hybrid applications
A hybrid application is called hybrid because it combines some of the functions that a native application and a web application have. This is a cross-platform application that has the ability to work with the phone software. These applications, like native ones, are downloaded from the application store, but the data is updated autonomously. Therefore, they always need an Internet connection – without it, web functions do not work. Android programming by simply cannot work without mashups.
Conclusion
Here are the main features of the applications. Which one to choose depends on what results in you are aiming at. Developing a hybrid app is cheaper and faster than building a native app. And users will not notice the difference anyway. Therefore, hybrid technologies are the most popular. Despite all this complexity, it is very easy to determine the choice of technology for developing an application. If your application cannot work without the native functions of mobile devices, if high processing speed is very important (games, social networks, geolocation), then nothing is better than a native application.
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