Is Mobile App development moving away from Native Apps?

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Once upon a time, not a long time ago, in my consulting experience, I came across ways of app development as Hybrid app development. Surely everyone trended during those times hybrid app save time, save money, less coding but… somehow it missed the “Richness of Experience.”

When we say richness of experience it is the exact amount cream we want on a cheesecake. Being both an iOS and Android user personally, I feel there some Powerful Native features that are missed in a Hybrid App.

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So came the world of Native Applications, where each platform builds personalized experience for example the scroll behavior and sticky headers for iOS and Android. The finance world needs there banking applications to be secure, well Native brought exactly the same security you want. Because I think in a hybrid app it's easy to challenge security through a web browser rather than Native SDK which secures caches and invalidates after a certain period makes a fresh API calls to fetch the values.

So what is the problem in the Native App? Is the world slowly tending away from the Native App?

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Well, the short sweet and 3 letters answer is Yes!

But Why? Let's analyze some numbers:- An estimated 40% of od Developers create Apps primarily for Android, while nearly 37% create for iOS.
A median price to create an APP is $171,450 while simple apps with fewer features can cost between $10,000 to $50,000.

Well, the world has money, what are the other challenges that we are facing recently using Native App?

Reusable components cross-platform — Customer experience has transitioned from cluttered experience to minimalistic and simple UI with the Global Experience Language model. So now that we have 2 Native Platforms the common components have 2 buckets that can be shared on specific 2 native platforms only. But both the Platforms component libraries cannot be mixed up or re-used.

Experience — The Native applications have specific behavior as well as the UI/UX being quite different. Now with amazing smartphones with amazing Telco plans people are switching quite often between iOS and Android. So now a customer takes some time to adapt to the Native behavior changes.

So what is the Solution?

1. React Native — Building a cross-platform application, React Native is probably your best choice. It is an open-source framework by Facebook, which works efficiently with the React library. With the help of React Native, you can build apps for both iOS and Android using the same components. It reduces the development time considerably and provides you with more time-to-market the product. React Native is known for its easy development methodology.
2. We obviously won't go back to the hybrid app, but what if we have a “Sensual” Hybrid App — Welcome Progressive Web Application(PWA).

The best of both worlds #

At their heart, Progressive Web Apps are just web applications. Using progressive enhancement, new capabilities are enabled in modern browsers. Using service workers and a web app manifest, your web application becomes reliable and installable. If the new capabilities aren’t available, users still get the core experience.

Example — https://medium.com/@the_manifest/11-examples-of-progressive-web-apps-944f6db25a5a

The only catch is, progressive web apps are not yet supported on all browsers or software. For example, they can’t use features such as GPS or fingerprint scanners.

As Bill Gates said “Customer is King” we need to see how the technology adapts to the change in trend from Native towards a better way of hybrid.