What would be your next step after making a decision to develop a mobile app for your business?
Most probably, you clearly realize how sustainable the growth of mobile development is. According to stats, the overall capitalization of the global mobile app market will reach $935 billion by 2023. Keeping this huge figure in mind, you would face a dilemma of what type of mobile app is worth your time and effort most.
Options are available: PWA, native apps, hybrid ones, and responsive web design. How to approach the right decision? First of all, you should determine the end goal of your future application. After that, you should compare the properties of different app types to figure out which one would fit your business goals best.
This is exactly what we are going to help you with. Find a brief but sufficient comparison of different app types in the present post to make no mistake.
Introductory factors for the app type selection
The choice of the app type begins with a clear understanding of the business goals the app helps achieve. The goals go hand in hand with the intended user audience of the app. It is necessary to assume how long your audience will be hanging out with your app as well as how many times a month your users will refer to the app.
At the other extreme, business-oriented functionalities of your app are accompanied by possible variants of UI/UX design, the ways of distribution to the market, and post-release support and maintenance.
Some may wonder why it is crucial to select a particular app type when the mobile app industry as a whole is developing at a very rapid rate. Can the examination of advantages of PWA over native apps, for instance, result in tangible financial outcomes? The following arguments can help realize why the “PWA vs hybrid vs native” comparison is never time wasted.
- The correctly selected type of your app can reflect not only the business logic and target audience. It can determine the developers you should find for your project. Developers differ, and the technologies they use along with the expected development period have a significant impact on the success of your project;
- When it comes to the cost of app development, every particular type of app has an intrinsically determined scope of the cost-related factors worth knowing from the very beginning. You should correlate your project budget with the objective cost of development;
- It is always worth understanding what the post-release maintenance and technical support of your app would require from you in the future.
Hence, the right choice of your app type is crucial for the sustainable success of your business. Having a clear idea of the difference between PWA and hybrid apps as well as understanding progressive web app advantages versus native apps can come from exploring the specificity of each type.
What is PWA?
Progressive web apps at their essence are websites that utilize special APIs to access certain functions of mobile devices. The API allows getting access to the device memory as well as integrating with push notifications (for Android). PWA runs in a separate tab of the browser. Users can launch PWA with a corresponding home-screen icon as it happens with the other mobile apps.
The very idea of combining web apps with native apps belonged to Google that represented PWA in 2015.
The most striking feature of PWA is using web browsers to run. Browsers launch PWA in their environments while acting as virtual machines for this type of application. Native apps, in contrast, require operating systems to run (Android, iOS). The majority of browsers support PWA nowadays. However, some of them are still working over the integration of the technology (Internet Explorer, Safari) while others have already implemented PWA completely (Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Edge, Brave).
Very briefly, the pros and cons of PWA might look like the following:
Pros
- A single team of developers can create PWA from A to Z;
- Web development skills are enough to create PWA;
- PWA is very easy to maintain;
- PWA starts working instantly out-of-the-box.
Cons
- Push notifications do not work in iOS;
- UX is inferior to the native apps’ one;
- Technical support for PWA is still limited;
- Distribution channels of PWA are not so straightforward as for native apps.
It might seem that PWA is the same as a responsive web app. But it isn’t so. There are some critical differences between progressive web apps and responsive web apps.
Home screen icons allow PWA to feel and look like native apps while responsive web apps have no such an option. Push notifications are realized through different mechanisms in PWA and responsive apps. The adoptive design of PWA does not require separately created code for different platforms as it happens with responsive apps. PWA has a higher loading speed due to the cached code which, by the way, allows using the app even offline.
The differences between PWA and native apps/hybrid apps are even more significant. They would become clear after considering those app types’ properties.
What is Native app?
Native apps are created for each particular mobile platform. Taking into account the existing state of affairs in the contemporary mobile market, we can legitimately indicate the two clear platform leaders: Android and iOS. If a native app is built for Android, it can not run on iOS.
In terms of hardware interaction, native apps appear a champion in the “PWA vs native app vs hybrid app” competition. Native apps have access to the entire hardware functionality of gadgets: GPS, camera, Bluetooth, microphone, fingerprint scanner, etc. Numerous opportunities are opened before native apps due to such functionality: 2F authentication, NFC payments, interfacing with other applications such as calendar, calls, etc.
Developers use different technologies to create native apps for different platforms (Swift for Android, for instance). Besides, native apps are always heavier than web apps and their launching time is correspondingly longer.
What is Hybrid app?
The technologies used for creating hybrid apps allow compiling code to be executed on both Android and iOS. Different techs can be used for such a purpose (C#, JavaScript+HTML5, etc). It means that hybrid apps occupy a mid-position with regard to the speed of development in the comparison progressive web app vs native vs hybrid.
Utilizing a unified code standard for multiple mobile platforms hybrid apps look and behave like native apps (if being developed properly, of course). In general, users hardly care about the type of app if it provides the functionality they expect. They can recognize a hybrid app when using both mobile platforms for the same application, that is not a frequent situation, however.
The main advantage of hybrid apps against native apps is in the project budget: since one hybrid app can substitute for two native apps, the development cost ought to appear lower…
