The principal motivation behind choosing hybrid apps is the faster pace of development achieved through a number of smart shortcuts. Well, this is why hybrid apps remained the most popular approach for cross-platform development. Hybrid apps are also an inexpensive option for startups and small businesses who can’t afford native development for each platform separately.
But in spite of giving you so much, hybrid apps equally make you compromise on many things. A hybrid app often lacks responsiveness and often your iOS app will end up looking like an Android app or vice versa. But if you think such compromises are nothing compared to the heavy price advantage that you get with a hybrid app for startup, let us tell that you have a better solution without exceeding your budget. Yes, you guessed it right. We are talking about React Native as a credible replacement for hybrid development.
Here through the length of this post we will compare these two solutions, hybrid apps and React Native.
Disadvantages of Hybrid Apps
You already have an idea about the value proposition of the hybrid apps that make such apps popular. But there are several factors that make hybrid apps worse options for businesses looking for a robust mobile presence. Let’s have a look at these disadvantages of hybrid apps.
Slower Performance
Compared to native apps, hybrid apps lack performance and pace. Hybrid apps by creating an additional layer between the mobile platform and the source code of the app actually pull down performance and speed to a great extent. Practically for this reason only, Facebook switched from HTML 5 to React Native a few years before.
Challenging Debugging Process
The presence of an extra layer between the device platform and the source code adds to the complexity of the debugging process. This, in turn, can actually be counterproductive as the finished app without going through rigorous debugging still can have a lot of bugs within the app.
Difficulty in Introducing New Features
Startups always try to take on the competition by providing the latest and most exciting range of features. This requires updating their apps from time to time with the addition of latest and fought-after features. But hybrid apps makes adding new features difficult. So, hybrid apps actually pull down the value proposition of an app by preventing timely value additions.
How React Native Helps Meeting These Shortcomings?
React Native has emerged principally as a solution to meet the development challenges with a hybrid development approach. Here we explain the key ways React Native helps developers in meeting the development challenges.
Low Budget Development
React is preferred by startups and small businesses principally because you can just hire a React Native app development company to build an MVP (minimum viable product) app with the basic and elementary features. For a startup, this will save a lot of costs while allowing us to build and release the app without compromising the key objective and user experience. By attracting further investment with the merit of this MVP app startup can venture to incorporate new features in the future.
Fast-Paced App Performance
React Native is well known for faster loading time and superb performance. Moreover, with reusable code and simple architecture React Native is also a great framework to build an app in a quick time.
Enhanced Security
As React Native uses JavaScript as the core programming language, the chances of coding errors and vulnerabilities are kept at a minimum. As of now, it has been seen that most apps built with React Native have been harder for hackers.
Cross-platform Development
In spite of the differences between iOS and Android platforms that make cross-platform development challenging, React Native handles it well without compromising on the native experience. With the core codebase used for both platforms, React Native also makes way for unique design and development elements to boast of a native feel for the platform. By recognizing the specific OS platform React native can pick up the right files and this can deliver a highly native user experience with minimum coding.
Time-Saving Solution
Thanks to React Native you don’t need to build two separate apps for iOS and Android. You can use the framework for building two uniquely platform optimized apps with the same code base. This will help developers to build an app in a fraction of time. At the same time for app testing and updating the app with value additions, you can deal with basically one app for two separate versions.
Superb App UI/UX
React Native has been conceptualized keeping the mobile UI in mind and naturally you have everything you need for building crisp UI for apps on both iOS and Android. Moreover, unlike frameworks like Angular or Vue, React Native is a fully-fledged JavaScript library loaded with all UI design elements for native apps. It is loaded with React Native Material Design, React Native Elements, and a few others that developers can access at any time.
Native Look, Feel and User Experience
While other cross-platform app development platforms like Cordova build apps using HTML and JavaScript in a web view, React Native directly utilized native platform widgets to ensure optimum native user experience as well as native look and feel.
Hot Reloading
When modifying the source code of the React Native app, you don’t need to run the app again and again to see the changes. The newly added features are reflected in real-time. After updating the source code you can see the changes in real-time.
Developer Friendly Tools
For cross-platform app developers, React Native provides a gamut of future-ready and sophisticated features and capabilities. While developing apps with React Native the developer doesn’t need to wait for code compilation to review the edits. The React Native developers can carry out changes in the running app.
Apart from this, React Native also comes with a layout engine-referred as Flexbox. This engine provides you the layout code for both iOS and Android platform.
Conclusion
With so many advantages, it is quite natural that React Native has already taken over the hybrid app development approach. For cross-platform app development, React Native is the obvious first choice followed by others.
