Mobile Development

Strategic Technologies is well positioned, with its extensive portfolio of developer talent and project management experience, to assist it's clients with their end-to-end mobile application development process. This includes the full spectrum of the development process, starting at UI/UX ideation and creation to server side backend and API development.

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Strategic offers native and hybrid mobile development services on Android, iOS and Windows Phone, and also cross-platform mobile development using technologies such as React, Xamarin, Apache Cordova, Adobe PhoneGap, Ionic, etc. We can walk you through the entire end-to-end process to help make sure end up with a mobile application that delivers the results you need and expect. Whether you choose hourly based T&M or a fixed fee project-based approach; Strategic can structure the engagment to meet your specific needs.

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Native apps, hybrid apps, and web apps are able to meet the needs of mobile users in cetain situations. There is no unique best solution since each has its strengths and weaknesses, therefore, choosing one over another depends on each company’s unique needs.

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Mobile, web, and hybrid applications have transformed customer, and user, interaction by not only improving business processes and increasing worker productivity, they have also importantly provided customers and end users with a rich and portable experience that increases their interaction and engagement with your brand. Effective mobile user interface (UI) design is today a a critical and essential driver of growth for virtually every brand on the planet.

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Smartphone portability and ease of use make mobile applications extremely simple to use and generally shorten the learning curve for app users. Mobile applications clearly offer valuable sales and marketing opportunities – but only if they are created with a clear purpose. For this reason, goals and target audience should be clearly researched and defined before embarking on a mobile app project.

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Should you develop a native, web, or hybrid mobile app?

There are three main mobile app types to consider for your mobile app: web, native and hybrid. All three development paths hold intrinsic value, but which approach is right for your project?

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Well known hybrid apps are Google gmail, Apple App Store, Twitter, Instagram, Evernote and Uber, popular web apps are Saas apps such as Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce and Netsuite, and native apps are typically what you would install from apps stores (although some of these apps can be hybrid apps).

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Depending on your business objectives and overall product goals, this decision can make or break the success of your mobile strategy. Deciding to build your mobile product as either a web, native or hybrid app involves a variety of factors for consideration. 

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Native mobile apps are the most common type of application. They are built for specific platforms and are written in platform specific languages. For example, Swift and Objective-C for native iOS apps and Java or Kotlin for native Android apps. Native apps are also built using the specific Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for the selected operating systems. They reside solely on the device and are typically accessed through icons on the device home screen. Native apps are installed through an application store (such as Google Play or Apple’s App Store). Since native apps are developed specifically for one platform, they are typically designed and optimized to take full advantage of all the device's features and capabilities. Meaning, they often utitlize and access the camera, GPS, accelerometer, microphone, compass, contact lists, phone numbers, etc. Native apps can also send notifications using the device’s notification system and can be used when the device is offline. 

Web apps are not real applications; they are really websites that, in many ways, look and feel like native applications, but are not implemented as such. They are run by a browser and typically written in HTML5. Users first access them as they would access any web page, meaning, they navigate to a specific url and can create a bookmark to that page. Web apps became quitey popular when HTML5 came around and people realized that they can obtain native-like functionality in the browser. Today, as more and more sites use HTML5, the distinction between web apps and regular web pages is becoming less and less. For this reason, a web app is often hard to distinguish from a native app. For instance, there are no visible browser buttons or bars, although it is running in a browser. Users can swipe horizontally to move on to new sections of the app and, due to browser caching, it’s possible to read cached content when offline. These are all features that are available in HTML5.  The drawback is that there are native features that remain inaccessible in the browser, such as notifications and the ability for the app to to run in the background.

 

By developing hybrid mobile apps, you can have a single dev team and create an app for all platforms. This brings the benefit of having a single code base — the code that will be in the Android and in the iOS app share the same base, which is much better when maintenance is required, and upgrades are released, across multiple platforms.

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This all sounds good, but it does not always work out as hoped and this is where native apps can have their place since they usually deliver better performance and functionality than hybrid apps since they are purpose built for each platform in the most efficient language for manipulating that platform. Meaning, unlike hybrid apps, native apps are purpose built for iOS, Android, Windows, etc. For example, although React Native allows a portion of the code to be shared between platforms it empowers developers to create native apps which can feel less clunky and perform better than hybrid apps.

 

A hybrid app is an application written using web technologies and wrapped in a thin native web-browser. One advantage is that a hybrid app can quickly be ported to various platforms where they share the same underlying codebase. A Hybrid app is like a native application, meaning, it runs on the device itself as opposed to inside a browser, but is coded using web technologies such as HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. Native apps are written in platform specific languages using platform APIs, like Java or Kotlin for Android, and Objective C or Swift for iOS, whereas hybrid apps are written using web technologies like HTML5/CSS and Javascript. 

 

Hybrid mobile applications are typically underpinned by a hybrid app framework and run inside a native container leveraging the device’s browser engine, but not the browser itself. This way they can render the HTML and process the JavaScript locally. With hybrid apps a web-to-native abstraction layer must be used to enable access to device capabilities that are usually not accessible in mobile web applications, such as the accelerometer, camera, and local storage. Native apps, by default, have direct access to these platform specific capabilities and therefore do not need this additional abstraction layer.