Native mobile app development involves
building apps for specific mobile operating systems and allowing users access
to them from dedicated app stores. These mobile apps don’t run in web browsers.
According to IDC’s 2018 data, Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android have
expelled all other mobile operating systems out of the market during 2018,
which is to say that in 2019 native mobile app development is all about
building native apps for iOS and Android devices. So, in order to
build an application for iOS, app developers will use programming languages
like Objective-C or Swift. In contrast, developing for Android will call for
programming languages such as Java or Kotlin. The dedicated app store for each
of them being App Store and Google Play respectively.
Creating a native app will demand a team having deep expertise with the
language and API of the said platform. Native mobile development results in
truly indigenous experiences that take the most benefit out of a given
platform. Thus, once you decide to provide your business with a digital
presence, you will eventually start leaning towards this exact option and
quickly make the obvious choice in its favor. Indeed, native environments are
the best fit for a variety of applications as it offers higher performance,
easy access to hardware controls, API integration, consistent look, and full
functionality. Native apps are also more secure and reliable.
It is preferable to
engineer a native mobile application when developing mobile solutions based on
video or game scenarios or apps with visually loaded design, navigation, and
animations. It also becomes relevant when integrating hardware-related
features, such as gestures, multitouch events, geolocation tracking, etc.
These apps
are conceived and augmented for a specific platform. As a result, the app
demonstrates an extremely high level of performance. They are exceptionally
fast and responsive because they are built for that specific platform and are
compiled using the platform’s core programming language and APIs without
depending on the middleware’s such as plugins and web views. As a result, the
app is much more efficient; which is especially important to performance –
centric apps like games and heavy graphic apps.
The native
mobile apps are developed using native software development kits (SDKs) which
makes the user interface (UI) appear consistent with their platform. This
ensures better user experience as the discrepancies between OS and app design
is now minimized. These apps also comply better with the app store guidelines,
because of their construction.
However,
there also lies a downside to the use of a
native app. The native app development is quite an expensive bit, which means
that the expenses are doubled (or even tripled), depending on how many
platforms you want to cover. The primary reason for this is posed by limited
code reusability. While building exclusive apps on the two major platforms such
as iOS and Android (or a third i.e. Windows), you staff two separate teams with
different sets of expertise; engineer all the features in different ways and
then fix quite a variety of different bugs. That means two separate apps, two
codebases, two development teams, and expenses for all of it.