What is hybrid?

Have you have decided to build a mobile application you want to be downloadable from the iOS App Store & Android Play Store, or distributed to your company/audience by direct download?

Maybe you are commissioning an app build from an agency or freelance developer and they have made a technology suggestion?

Or, you’re a techy researching technology options?

This article is designed to answer some common questions from people in the above situations.

11 years ago (10th July 2008) the ios app store opened, 11 years ago (22nd October 2008) the Play Store got its first app. At these times you had no choice but to build apps using the native programming languages that provided the operating systems of these devices; Objective C (now evolved to Swift) for iOS and Java for Android.

Mobile phones are a relatively new technology and both their hardware and software has evolved fast over the years. Back in the day when you wanted a mobile app you had to have a minimum of 2 developers working on your app, with specialist skills which weren’t easily shared. This meant it was costly to build and maintain apps, and generally only the biggest companies could afford to do that.

Fast forward 5 years the landscape had changed a lot. Software development is forever evolving as people look for faster, more reliable, cheaper ways of doing things. How the web has taken off in that time has lead much of this, everything is now driven through the web and as a result of these advancements people expectations of what can be done with software have got bigger.

Product managers and senior tech decision makers have got used to the speed and flexibility that has become second nature in the web world, and are asking why the same isn’t true for app development.

Then along came the first major hybrid app language - Ionic (March 2014) and a year later Facebook released React Native - (March 2015 - public release).

These 2 companies and others that have followed all have their own take on how “hybrid” should be done and they all have their own merits/pitfalls.

To be continued...