The demand for digitizing a business is growing over time and every day when you don’t have a digital presence in the form of a mobile app, you are missing out on lots of opportunities. Currently, there are more than 8 million mobile apps available collectively on the Google Play and Apple App Store featuring businesses from various industries.
Meanwhile, smartphone users spend 90% of their usage time on mobile applications. That’s how mobile apps have digitized our daily lives as a path for communication between a business and users.
To target the audience at all mediums, it is essential to have an online presence on both web and mobile. So, that’s where businesses struggle to meet the ends of investing in digitization and resources to stabilize. Therefore, hybrid apps are a better solution to grow your business digitally by having a single solution for web and mobile.
In this blog, we will cover all the relevant aspects of hybrid app development to give you a clear perspective for its deployment.
What is a Hybrid App and How it Works?
In simple words, a hybrid app is a blend of web and native experience. When an app development company builds a hybrid app, they use a single code base to deploy it on all platforms. So, they need to program the application only once and utilize it accordingly.
The development of a hybrid app is usually based on the web stack of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Once the programming is completed, the code is further encapsulated into a native application utilizing hybrid frameworks, like Ionic or React Native.
As a result, it enables the application to function on each platform’s app store. It means apart from the web access, you can also install them directly through the relevant app store like a native app.
There are specific plugins that you can integrate to ensure accessibility with different hardware features of the device like camera, contacts, or GPS. Moreover, you can include several UI components to provide a native interface in your app.
Key Features and Benefits of a Hybrid Mobile App
Hybrid applications are beneficial in several ways for any business as they take less time and effort to target a huge audience. Furthermore, the following are the features that you can take advantage of by deploying a hybrid app:
Easy to scale:
As hybrids apps are programmed through a single source code throughout all platforms. So, you can scale up your business across the masses from both web and mobile formats. If you have deployed it on the Android operating system, you can further launch it on iOS while having the same functionality.
Low maintenance:
Upgradation is a continuous process for any application. So, when you update any feature in your application by updating the codebase then it will be implemented across all platforms where your application is deployed. You don’t need to update each program for different platforms like in native apps.
Offline accessibility:
While having a web presence, you can still access a hybrid app in offline mode based on its native infrastructure. So, the users can interact with the application without having an internet connection and view their previously loaded information.
Popular Examples of Hybrid Applications
Hybrid applications are not something rare as many giant organizations are already using them due to the flexibility and cost-effectiveness it offers. Following are some popular examples of hybrid apps:
Gmail
Almost every other person uses Gmail and that’s one of the key reasons this app is hybrid as we can access it on both webview and as a mobile app. It utilizes a large-scale stack of technologies as personal while using the web view to offer a cross-platform experience to its users.
Originally, Instagram was developed as a native app by providing access to mobile users. Since it got more popular, it became a part of the Facebook ecosystem after it was picked up by Meta.
Now, the demand for scalability has increased for Instagram and Facebook programmed its functionality using React Native. It has become a seamless application that you can access from mobile and the web.
Amazon App Store
Amazon shopping is an impactful example of a hybrid application in the current digital era. The user experience of the Amazon App Store has been enhanced after making it accessible across different platforms.
The application is built using HTML5 with relevant web technologies while iterating a seamless UI and native code. That’s how users can take advantage of device features like cameras or push notifications.
Final Thoughts
Hybrid app development is undoubtedly a full-fledged solution in this demanding digital market where you have to maximize the reach of your business over time to remain competitive. Therefore, app developers in the UK are focusing on deploying this technology to provide scalable app development services. Considering all the aspects covered in this blog, you can easily rely on hybrid apps to digitize your business to make a wider impact.
