Understanding native app development - what you need to know in 2020

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.