Ever heard of Hybrid applications or Native applications?
Well, the stuff you are going to read is all about hybrid applications. If you are a novice in this field or have good experience in building native applications, then continue!
Gone are the days when you built an application for Android then tried to build the similar one for iOS. Isn't that a lot of work. What if you could build them both together?
Well, first of all, let me tell you that there are two kinds of application; native and hybrid!
Native apps are built for use on particular OS! For example, if you build an Android app using Android Studio (of course, Android Studio is only for Android app :p ), you can use it only on Android phones.
However, if you build a hybrid application, you can run it on multiple OSes! Just write once and run everywhere!
Is this a new technology? No, it's quite old. In fact ,there are quite a large number of hybrid apps.
Some of the high performing hybrid applications are Evernote, Twitter, Gmail, YouTube, Uber, Instagram.
Surprised? Yeah, big companies are preferring hybrid applications over native!
The big question is, why a hybrid application over a native one?
Write once and run anywhere
The first and biggest advantage is its scalability. It’s literally based on the concept of platform-independence. Write once and run anywhere! Although the anywhere is limited to the framework. Just imagine, you have a client who pays “x” amount to build an android application and “y” amount to build a iOS application, you can have “x+y” amount , consume less time and still deliver them two products by coding just once! Isn’t that exciting?
Instant Debug
Another big advantage of the application is, it is easy to test. In android/ios for device testing, one has to get cables and wait for a long time (feels like ages) to run it on a device. Yes, we can use simulators, but those are also too slow and consume lots of memory! But in the case of hybrid frameworks, you can run it on the browser! It's as fast as developing a website. Instant changes reflect instantly.
To build a hybrid application there exists many frameworks. You can even build your own framework. I will discuss about ionic framework.
Ionic is a complete open-source SDK for hybrid mobile app development. The original version was released in 2013 and built on top of AngularJS and Apache Cordova.
The other frameworks in the game are Meteor, Monaco, OnSen UI.
I have developed quite a number of applications using Ionic Framework. So, let's discuss it!
Why use Ionic Framework?
It has a very well explained documentation and ample resources are available over the internet. Now, this does not mean other hybrid frameworks are bad! Moreover, I only know Ionic in detail. :P
What is required to learn Ionic?
Sound knowledge of Javascript, CSS, HTML and Angular is required. However, these languages are not used in Ionic anymore. Ionic 3 uses TypeScript (Father of JavaScript), SCCS , HTML 5 and Angular 4 in it’s latest version of framework.
Well well well, if hybrid applications are so good, why isn’t it used everywhere? With great technologies come great side effects.(that didn’t sound copied, did it?) Hybrid frameworks convert your code into the respective operating systems to run. Basically it’s like adding an extra layer between the operating system and your code. So, does that make any difference? Yes it does, applications become bit slow. It depends upon the frameworks. Usually hybrid applications are not smooth enough!
And the available resources are not enough sometimes. Since, there are a lot of frameworks, various people work on different frameworks. So, the resources over hybrid applications gets scattered away along with various frameworks unlike the native ones. Resources specific to android and ios will always share the largest chunk available!
But, we must accept hybrid applications are the future. We need to learn and adapt ourselves towards the age of hybrid applications!
Learn. Build. Enjoy.