Understanding Different Types of Mobile Applications
                     Understanding Different Types of Mobile 
Applications
Melissa charm
Writer at smb-trends.com, writes 
content on new SMB trends.
Apart from the conventional use of communication, cell phones are 
being used today for browsing websites, playing games, establishing 
social contacts etc. This increase in mobile usage has lead to the 
development of many mobile apps, which are typically available 
through app stores of mobile operation systems. Whether it is for 
online shopping or sending twitter message to a friend, people are 
hardly turning to their desktops as many of them are finding mobile 
apps as convenient sources for their browsing needs. Just like the 
regular internet sites, the usage of mobile apps demands greater end 
user experience as well. If mobile applications take longer to 
download or have poor performance then the users feel unhappy 
and leave the app with frustration.
Based on architecture mobile applications are broadly divided into 
basic three categories.
Native Apps
One of the distinguishing feature that seperates native apps from 
other mobile applications is that they are designed and coded for one 
specific platform or device. Example: iPhone apps are written in 
Objective-C and Android apps are coded in Java. To get access to the 
native apps, they can be downloaded from public or private online 
app stores (Example – Apple’s App Store or Google Play). Since these 
apps are device specific, they take full advantage of device 
capabilities, features and other software that are typically installed 
on that platform. Once installed, the users can have access to mobile 
apps without connecting to the internet. The main diasadvantage is, 
native apps will not work with other platforms or devices. Native 
apps that are developed for one platform will not run in other device 
or platform. For instance, 
Mobile Web Apps
Mobile web apps are nothing but mobile versions of websites. They 
include all the functionality of website and are developed using web 
technologies such as JavaScript, CSS, HTML5 or other languages. 
Mobile web apps do not appear on the App Store and Google Play 
and require no installation. They can be accessed directly through 
internet on mobile browsers like Safari or Chrome. Unlike native apps 
that are specific to the device platform, web apps are designed 
common for every platform and therefore they won’t look or behave 
like real apps. Today, you will find hundreds of examples for web apps 
that can be viewed in mobile browsers like Flipkart, Gmail mobile 
web app, Google maps etc.
Hybrid Apps
Hybrid apps are mid-way between web and native mobile apps. In 
such applications, the features of native apps are embedded into 
mobile web applications. Like native applications, they are available 
in app store and take the advantage of device features to provide 
better user interface. However, the content is rendered through web 
part of the application using HTML. Hybrid apps are very popular 
among mobile app designs because they allow cross-platform 
development. That means, the same code can be reused to develop 
applications on different mobile operating systems. Many popular 
social media applications like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin are best 
examples of hybrid apps as they have application interface installed 
on the device but content is loaded from the web.
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