Hybrid apps – are they better than native? Explanation and examples

Did you know that Instagram is a hybrid application? It’s virtually impossible to tell until you learn it, because it works perfectly on both iOS and Android.

In this article, I’ll explain what hybrid apps are, and how they fit in the modern software development ecosystem.

What are hybrid apps?

In the world of commercial (=created by a business to make money) applications there are three big players:

• Web applications
• Native mobile applications
• Hybrid applications

Let’s analyze them all to get the big picture of the modern application development environment.

Web applications

When it comes to the biggest players, like Facebook or YouTube, they started out as web applications. Then mobile came around and suddenly, a lot of people didn’t even have computers, they just used their mobile devices to connect to the internet.

That trend continues today, especially with the younger population, or ‘zoomers’, and a big part of the millennial generation as well.

Companies couldn’t ignore that trend, so everybody started going mobile. At the peak of mobile hype, a lot of companies engaged in unnecessary development of mobile apps just for the sake of marking their presence in the mobile app environment. This was largely caused by smart salespeople and marketers, who had to sell software development services, and started convincing every manager that all companies need to have mobile apps.

Nowadays the hype for mobile has died down, and rightfully so. Kids might be hooked to Instagram and Tik Tok, but adults that need professional services or products still look for them in Google, either on their computers, or their mobile devices.

Not just that, but the personal website movement might be coming back in a huge wave. With social media full of crap and manipulative ads, and blockchain technology enabling the sort of connection between websites that the first founders of the Web could only imagine, websites are gaining importance again.

That’s not to say that they ever stopped being important. Marketers in B2B companies all know, that the main source of inbound leads is their own website with a blog and other types of rich, valuable content.

Building simple websites is easier than ever. If you have money to spend, you can just buy a premium Wix or WordPress membership, use a template, and voila. Your website is ready.

You can also hire a web developer to build a completely custom site. Or buy a template, learn a bit of HTML and CSS, and just insert your own content into the template.

Every major programming language has a framework for web application development. The most popular examples include Rails for Ruby ( you can find ruby on rails developers on talmatic.com), Laravel for PHP, and Django for Python. There’s also Javascript, which went from a small tool for adding interactivity to websites, to a general-purpose programming language which boasts the most important web development frameworks today: Angular, Node, React, Vue, and more.

Native mobile applications

Mobile applications started gaining traction when the first iPhone hit the market, along with competing Android devices.

But it took a while until the first serious hybrid development frameworks came to be, and they are still a niche. Most developers build apps for the web using web development tools, and apps for mobile using mobile development tools.

Mobile-only development tools are called native. Just like natives in England speak English, native apps in the mobile world ‘speak’ the language of their respective operating system. That is Java for Android, Swift and Objective C for iOS, and .NET on Windows phones (are those even still a thing?).

And that’s pretty much it. Native apps are rendered in the user’s smartphone. Hybrid apps, as you’ll read in the next paragraph, rely on an additional web browser window, that is created in the background in order to put the app on your device. You don’t see it, but it’s there.

That carries several big advantages. When the app is rendered on your smartphone, it works faster, it’s more smooth. If it’s an app that is supposed to be used offline, then there’s really no other way than to use native mobile development tools. Otherwise, users won’t be able to use them if their internet goes awry, and that would go against the whole ‘offline’ thing.

Native applications on a specific system all have a similar look and feel. You’ll notice that iOS apps and Android apps have several differences when it comes to interfaces and application flow. There are a lot of developers that only focus on one system, because it can be costly to create a separate app just to accommodate the other app ecosystem.

You’ve probably had that problem before, where a great app is only available for iOS, but you use an Android smartphone and can’t download it.

These days, the best apps usually have a web version that you can still run on your phone. But when it comes to specialized niche apps, for example apps for music production, a lot of them are only available for iOS.