Rise of the "Hybrid" Mobile App

When Lotte Card, one amongst South Korea's biggest mastercard corporations, needed to make an augmented-reality app earlier this year, it faced a well-known conundrum: whether or not to develop a complicated custom app for every major mobile platform out there or manufacture one less-capable internet app that works on any device via its browser. In the end, the corporate set to try and do somewhat of each.

With the assistance of development partner Worklight, Lotte's programmers created many HTML-based pages using normal tools—HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript—and then wrapped them up in native iOS and Android code in order that the ensuing bundle might be delivered, similar to the other app, via the Apple and Android app stores.

The key advantage of internet apps over native mobile apps is cross-platform compatibility. They run within the standards-compliant browsers that are offered on Android, Apple, BlackBerry, and Windows mobile devices, therefore (in theory at least) they need to be designed just once. The disadvantages are that they lack access to such options of a tool because the camera and therefore the address book, they can not use a number of user-interface parts that are native to every platform, and that they cannot be downloaded from Apple's App Store or the Android Market.

Most native apps will faucet into the device's browser, so as to grab content from the online. because the type of mobile platforms grows, a lot of corporations is also drawn to using this capability, making hybrid apps that use internet technologies however will be distributed via the standard app stores.

"The slickness of the user interface a developer are able to do within the native [app] model simply is not definitely worth the further spending compared to the terribly nice level of user-interface expertise they get from the hybrid choice," says Ron Perry, CTO of Worklight. Worklight uses the open-source PhoneGap platform to assist developers package internet apps among native apps in order that they'll be downloaded from app stores.

The primary competitor to PhoneGap is Appcelerator's Titanium Studio, a development surroundings that takes a rather completely different approach. rather than showing website among an app, this platform recompiles an internet app's (JavaScript) code into native code which will access all the device-specific user-interface parts of iOS, Android, and BlackBerry's platform. (It isn't nonetheless compatible with Windows Phone.)