What are the different types of mobile applications?
Different types of Mobile Applications
In this tutorial, you will learn different types of Mobile applications or Mobile apps. Basically, there are three types of Mobile applications.
- Native Apps
- Mobile website
- Hybrid apps
Native apps
Native applications are developed by using platform-specific native API libraries and SDKs. A native application is developed for a particular mobile device such as Android, iOS, etc.
So we need to develop the application for each mobile operating system platform i.e iOS, Android, etc. These apps work only on the particular platform on which they are designed to work. They can run in online mode as well as offline mode.
Users have to download the native applications from the respective application stores provided by the mobile operating system vendors.
For example: WhatsApp Native app on Google Play store for Android mobile devices.
Mobile Web (m-Web app)
m-Web or Mobile web applications are websites just made responsive to the mobile small screens. These applications can be accessed using mobile browsers. Popular websites that do not want to develop native applications can provide Mobile websites for mobile users. We can use JavaScript or frameworks like React to develop these apps.
The advantage of these apps is that the development is quick and develops can maintain a single code base for all mobile platforms. The disadvantage is that mobile device access is very limited to apps.
Hybrid app
The Hybrid app is a combination of the above types. They are existing web applications that are exposed as a native application format. These apps are written in HTML5, Javascript, CSS within a native container to get the best of both application formats.
Example tools that wrap HTML apps to native container is: Cordova
- https://cordova.apache.org/
