Developing hybrid app nowadays is a fast way to get great apps that run on different platforms (mostly Android and iOS). You think to have one codebase JS-HTML-CSS, using some plugin in order to communicate with the device and the app is done for the market but it’s never like you think!
Lately in LinkMe we have develop an app in collaboration with a travel agency using a mobile Javascript framework called Ionic.
The app is: MyAlpitour World and is available on AppStore and Play Store.
The concept of this app was to organize everything related with your travels in one place, defining different sections like: news, flights informations, assistance, feedback, checklist and a social section called “travel’s diary”. In this section the user can upload pictures, audio and video of his current travel, every day with difference cover image and digital contents.
All of these features are available also offline.
Going deeper a bit the first thing that came in our mind was the large use of external plugins in order to communicate with the device and take pictures, video and record audio and saving all the information somewhere in order to be used in offline mode.
It was a big challenge because it’s a lot of data usable in an offline mobile device.
The good part
Developing an hybrid app is a faster and more productive way to get your app done knowing the web technology.
The difference is that hybrid apps are hosted inside a native application that utilizes a WebView in order to access to device capabilities such as the accelerometer, camera, and more. Usually it is not possible to access those capabilities from inside mobile browsers.
The chosen technology was Ionic, a javascript framework that is based from Apache Cordova a platform that provides a consistent set of JavaScript APIs to access device capabilities through plug-ins, which are built with native code.
We are a javascript software house, so hybrid apps fit perfectly with us and our work.
The bad part
The hybrid choice is not always the best solution for you app. It depends which platform you want to reach and considering the android ecosystem which version you want to support.
As mentioned before you need to pay attention which plugin you want to use because the mobile world is going very fast and those plugins need to be updated as fast as the market.
Performance is usually a hot topic! Obviously a customer wants a fast and reactive app delivered yesterday and spending as less money as possible. They don’t understand that hybrid apps don’t give you the same performance and experience of a native one, even if, because of the improvement of the hardware of the devices this difference is becoming every day smaller.
Talking about experience, a common mistake is blaming the developers if the app has not a usable experience and it doesn’t look “cool” or follow the styleguides of the platform. This is mostly wrong! Most of the times developers just get the design and it has to be done.
Conclusion
We like hybrid apps!
But as always it depends what you want and the resources you have for the project.
We are happy to share our experience with anyone who is interested in this world or let us know if you have an experience to share!
