Hybrid
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Executive Summary
Three Key Takeaways
Mobile app development is only just beginning to explore all the new technological options for developing, managing, and enhancing apps. One option beginning to gain traction for both customer and enterprise employee facing mobile apps is hybrid
development. Hybrid utilizes the best from both native and web apps, providing greater uniformity across digital channels, faster development, and easier updating. This white paper will explore the dynamic field of mobile app development and advances in hybrid app technology.
Today, there are three common mobile app development strategies that can be utilized. Native app development leads in performance and user experience, while HTML/Web development is ideal for multi-platform use. Hybrid development combines features of both native and HTML/Web development designed for specific development/usage criteria.
Hybrid app development has recently gained in popularity - providing a rapid development solution for many types of mobile apps including.
mission-critical, frequently used, offline, enterprise and m-commerce apps. Crittercism understands hybrid development’s rise within the market and has reacted accordingly with new extensions to its mobile app intelligence SDKs. These new extensions provide single agent visibility across the
native and hybrid components of an app leading to improved app performance and outstanding customer experience.
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Introduction
Hybrid app development has been touted as the future of mobile apps for nearly a
decade now and Gartner predicts that by 2016 more than 50 percent of mobile apps will be hybrid. This is because hybrid is seen as a way to combine the superior performance and user experience of developing in native mobile frameworks, with the speed, flexibility, content control and lower cost of developing in HTML.
But until recently, hybrid mobile app development fell short of user experience and performance expectations. Originally overhyped, hybrid apps failed to deliver the promised quality forcing leading vendors such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Lumosity to replace hybrid-built mobile apps with native code.
After Facebook’s first run with the new development style, CEO Mark Zuckerberg recalled their experience with hybrid apps saying, “We had to start over and rewrite everything to be native. We burned two years.” While LinkedIn’s director of mobile engineering stated, “There are a few things that are critically missing. One is tooling support - having a
debugger that actually works, performance tools that tell you where the memory is running out.”
Now, advances in technology are finally making hybrid development deliver mobile apps with the robust, seamless performance users expect even across an increasingly
fragmented device landscape.
Crittercism, a pioneer in mobile app intelligence, rings in change with SDK extensions for mobile app intelligence that lets app vendors better understand the user experience for hybrid apps and focus their development accordingly, for a faster path to customer satisfaction.
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Three Contrasting Approaches
There are three leading approaches to developing mobile apps: Using a language and development framework that are native to the mobile environment; desktop-based Web technologies (usually HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS); and a hybrid approach, running Web application content in a native container.
No one methodology dominates the market. About 40 percent of mobile developers use HTML5, according to research firm VisionMobile, leaving the remainder of the market divided between native and hybrid approaches.
Native coding (in languages such as Java for the Android platform, Swift and Objective-C for iOS, and C# for Windows Phone) offers the best performance and user experience, according to Forrester’s “Web, Hybrid, And Native Mobile Apps All Have Their Place” report.
Because these native languages were optimized to run on mobile devices, they execute faster; handle offline processing and storage more efficiently; access the functions of on-phone devices (such as a camera), touch ID, accelerometers and GPS trackers more easily; and have more direct access to other in-platform features such as push notifications and in-app purchases. Further, native apps face easier adoption into the Apple and Google app stores making them more financially practical.
The problem is, developers with these specialized skills are hard to find, inflating the cost of developing apps with native software development kits. It’s also time-consuming for vendors to build and test different versions of their app for each platform. Developers typically target only 2.2 different platforms per app, down from 2.9 platforms in 2013, according to VisionMobile. If you take games out of the equation, developers only target an average of 1.75 different platforms per app.
Another popular strategy is to develop mobile apps in a Web framework (HTML5), or even scale down existing desktop Web apps to work on a mobile browser.
This approach is easier to port to multiple platforms – and also less expensive, since it’s easier to find developers with HTML skills than specialized mobile languages. Keep in mind that speed and cost are particular concerns when developing for mobile devices, as new handsets and OS upgrades are pushed out every three to six months (in contrast to the 12 to 18 months of enterprise software). Moreover, HTML5 enables developers and publishers control and update content easily.
The big shortcoming to HTML5 is that it offers a less immersive customer experience, since it can’t leverage smartphone features such as the camera or GPS tracker as easily. It also fails to render images particularly fast and smoothly.
Zuckerberg famously stated at TechCrunch in 2012, the biggest strategic mistake his company made in the last few years was “betting too much on HTML5 as opposed to native.” He attributed this misstep to the approach’s incomplete maturity, leading to an overall lack of quality.
Zuckerberg’s opinion was echoed by other companies including LinkedIn, which in 2013 dropped the HTML5 mobile apps it had been building in favor of native code which it had used previously. Performance, memory leaks and less-than-smooth rendering were the primary problems, according to senior director of engineering, Kiran Prasad.
However, neither company gave up on HTML5 or hybrid approaches altogether. “I’m actu-ally, long-term, really excited about [HTML5],” Zuckerberg noted. “We actually have more people on a daily basis using mobile Web Facebook than we have using our iOS or
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Due to the different strengths of Web development and native code, developers have tried to get the best of both worlds with a hybrid approach for at least a decade – that is, building dynamic HTML Web views that run in more static native code containers.
Hybrid apps offer at least some of the speed, flexibility and lower cost of HTML
development, because developers can reuse the Web code and content across multiple platforms and app versions. Only the native code wrappers need to be submitted for approval to the various app vendor stores. Meanwhile, the native code offers superior visual rendering and access to phone features, which is key for customer satisfaction. But in the early days of smartphones, the hybrid approach faced several performance handicaps. According to Forrester, it was hampered by the Web view component because Apple and Google both use separate rendering engines with slower performance within their hybrid apps.
Additionally, app builders had to sort through a mishmash of development and
debugging tools, with each component of a hybrid app – native code on the device and HTML on the server – requiring different tools. Naturally, buying and learning to use those tools added to development cost and time. And none of tools followed the user
experience across both environments, so developers were never seeing the full story.
Hybrid Today Comes into Its Own
The current generation of hybrid app tools and SDKs is making the outlook more hopeful. Forrester even titled a recent research report, “New Tools Make Hybrid Apps a Safer Bet.” As Forrester notes, hybrid app development still isn’t ideal for every use case. But it’s a great solution in many cases, including these:
Mission-critical and frequently used apps, because the Hybrid approach equally balances the trade-off between better user experience (due to native heritage) and faster development (HTML5).
Where offline use is significant, e.g. games, music, note taking and
other content-based applications – basically, whatever you could use on a plane ride.
Enterprise applications, especially if you need to draw information from client-server ERP and CRM software.
M-commerce applications such as retail and finance, where content is frequently updated. The app also needs to draw on phone features such as the camera for depositing checks or recognizing QR codes.
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What Crittercism Brings to The Table
Our new mobile app intelligence tool, which is an extension to our SDKs for iOS and Android, tracks real-time user experience, performance issues and diagnostic data of hybrid apps. This solution uses a single-agent approach to app intelligence that ties
together both sides of a Hybrid app – native functionality and Web views – into a single view.
This helps ensure that the hybrid app delivers the same functionality, speed and power of a native app, thus giving customers a better experience when using it.
“We’ve seen tremendous activity in hybrid app development among our customers in recent years, and the challenge has always been understanding user experience,” explained Robert Kwok, chief technology officer and cofounder of Crittercism. “Many times
performance issues can arise as users transition between the static, native side of an app and the more dynamic Web side. Historically, two separate agents, one on the mobile device and the other on the server, have been used to attempt to monitor hybrid, but this approach is cumbersome and offers an incomplete picture of user experience. Crittercism’s new single mobile agent unifies the monitoring of the disparate parts of a hybrid app so that companies can better understand and optimize their customers’ journey.”
Crittercism’s hybrid solution is particularly effective when combined with Crittercism’s Business Transactions feature, which allows customers to focus on mission-critical user workflows. In the case of hybrid, workflows may span both the native and Web portions of an app, enhancing the need for unified intelligence.
Conclusion
As smartphones become more ubiquitous (over 2 billion predicted to be in users’ hands by 2016) and user expectations of a flawless mobile experience mount, Hybrid development may just become the favored development approach. Why, because Hybrid apps will offer a best-of-both-worlds approach in use cases where customer experience is brand critical, and allows for affordable development times and costs.
Because understanding user experience is more challenging with hybrid app make-up, Crittercism offers a more powerful, flexible solution.