Customer experience for mobile is more important to your business than you might think. Nobody has time for bad user experiences, your customers and employees included.

What Do Consumers Really Need or Want?

The answer to that question is ever changing. When it comes to apps, however, there are a few basics. Consumers want:

• Easy access to product and store information
• Help planning and navigating trips
• The ability to communicate in real time

How cordova works

PhoneGap/ Cordova ambiguity

• Phonegap is a distribution of Apache cordova, you can think of Apache cordova as the engine that powers phonegap similar to how webkit is the engine that powers Chrome & Safari

5 questions to ask before you decide Native or Hybrid

• Do you want to use native features in the mobile app ?

• How quickly do you want to take it to the market ?

• Do you have separate budget for developers in Android & iOS ?

• How often do you need to update your mobile app ?

• Do you want to have the best user experience ?

Native Advantage

• Multi-touch: double taps, pinch-spread, and other compouned UI gestures

• Fast graphics API: is big deal if you’re using a lot of data and require a fast refresh

• Fluid animation: gaming highly interactive

• Ease of use: UI/UX better user experience

• Built-in components: camera, address book, geolocation, and other features native to the device

• Documentation: Books, StackOverflow, community

• Tools: Native development provides better development environment and tooling to test and debug

Hybrid Advantage

• Single code base across multiple platforms

• don’t have to update each app in the app store to wait for approvals

• you can use an existing web talent and don’t need to bring on additional ressources

• don’t need to do any API development since it’s all handled via the web

Scenarios for building apps in hybrid or native

• Hybrid:

  • For budgetary limitation, hybrid app may be a better choice

  • If there is a need to quickly develop the app, hybrid app may be a better choice

  • If the app is simple, does not have large animations, does not have lots of clicks and does not require lots of native user interaction, hybrid will be a better choice

• Native:

  • If the requirement is to create the best user experience, native development is a better choice

  • For companies with sufficient allocated budget that are planning to build and maintain large app projects and do not want to worry about limitations for implementing new technologies, and support, native is a better choice

Kapsel

Kapsel is a set of costom plugins developed by SAP underlying the cordova technology to meet the entreprise requirements like encryption storage, cache management, login, AuthProxy, etc..

ngCordova

ngCordova is a collection of 70+ AngularJS extensions on top of the Cordova API that make it easy to build, test, and deploy Cordova mobile apps with AngularJS.

Native vs Hybrid overview

In summary, we have reviewed:

• Native app is a smartphone app developed specifically for a mobile operating system

• Hybrid app are at core websites packaged into a native wrapper

• Native app have the best performance highest security, and best user experience

• If you have less than four months to develop an app, and you want to test a limited private market on the viability of your app, then use Hybrid. If the test works, then move to native as soon as you can and show it to the world. If it doesn’t work, you’ve saved yourself time and money

• If an executive pushes to do a web app for strong reasons, make sure they’re aware of the trade-offs

• There are clear and distinct advantages and disadvantages for both hybrid and native approaches, and that is why this discussion is still relevant

• Each approach has its pros and cons but at the end of the day a native approach will have the biggest benefits for a company’s bottom line

• Users will not tolerate a problematic mobile app, and will abandon it after only one or two failed attempts