Mobile applications are increasingly becoming a priority across all business sectors as companies look to extend their services to a population that is using smartphones and tablets.We use open source tools to develop high end apps while keeping the user experince secure.

In general, all mobile applications could be classified as being either web, hybrid, or native applications. Web applications utilise purely web code such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript, native applications utilise the native SDK of their specific platform, and hybrid applications are somewhere in between those two.

Native Apps

Native apps live on the device and are accessed through icons on the device home screen. Native apps are installed through an application store (such as Google Play or Apple’s App Store). They are developed specifically for one platform, and can take full advantage of all the device features — they can use the camera, the GPS, the accelerometer, the compass, the list of contacts, and so on. They can also incorporate gestures (either standard operating-system gestures or new, app-defined gestures). And native apps can use the device’s notification system and can work offline.

Web Apps

A hybrid app is a web app that is deployed to a native platform like iPhone inside a native harness. This harness is usually little more than a browser view (to display the HTML5 content) and some other hooks to allow your web app to potentially access some more hardware features that are not available inside the browser sandbox. It improves code portability because if you want to port your app to another platform, you only need a native harness on that other platform to run it, the HTML5 content of the app is directly portable.

These harnesses can be hand written, but can also be generated automatically by tools in the marketplace like the much lauded PhoneGap. These tools try and make a single point of contact for the developer, who can then turn around and push their app out to multiple platforms quickly by generating the harness and packages required to do so automatically. This sounds powerful, and it is, but clearly the PhoneGap people have a ton of configurations and hardware to support, and thus, the solutions do not always work the same across all devices, and in practice, testing and hacking of special cases will be required by the developer to get proper support if the app is anything more than a website in a browser control.