Trending Hybrid
Gartner Inc. says ,”By 2016, more than 50 percent of Mobile Apps deployed will be hybrid”.
Today enterprises are under constant pressure, from employees and management to develop and deploy mobile apps in order to accustom mobile work styles and enhance customer engagement. Mobility today is influencing mainstream strategies and tactics in terms of technology enablement and enterprises architectures in wider areas. Enterprises are in pressure to support multiple platforms in a similar way the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) gained traction.
Enterprises are looking to leverage mobile applications across multiple platforms in order to address the need for mobile applications. Appealed by the value added features of Hybrid Architecture, enterprises are racing ahead to gain the most out of this trend. Hybrid Architecture supports Rapid Application Development and portability of HTML5 Web apps with a native container (which facilitates access to native device features).
Gartner says that a major growth driver for all mobile application development platforms is the need for speedy application development and short update cycles which organizations are fighting to get aligned with their digital business plans. Hence, hybrid app development is not only concerned with offering a standard way of mobilizing web apps but it also fosters innovation and creating difference by leveraging APIs for device capabilities like the accelerometer, camera and other systems. Hence, analysts and hybrid mobile apps supporters see a strong trend towards hybrid app development becoming the norm.
Switching To Hybrid Apps
Consumers are becoming more and more picky about the apps they install. They are looking for amazing UX in apps that draw users with great engaging experience. Hybrid is not only the difference in building the apps but a great way to get up and running quickly. Many Rapid App Development product firms like Xamarin, Telerik, Scriptcase, WaveMaker, Dataflex, Visual Studio LightSwitch, Calypso Studio, believe that they want to make the hybrid application development easy and simple for developers which reduce the choices they have to make and hence provide clean and interactive user interface for end users.
Some challenges which reason out switching to hybrid:
- Too frequent Android and iOS updates – Often include underlying platform changes i.e. tablets and smartphones apps that run on them also have to be updated regularly.
- Costly Maintenance – Developers look for constant updates and redo of codes. This makes maintenance very costly and it takes up a lot of the developer’s time.
- Native UI Guidelines – Different platforms have different guidelines for rendering the UI. The menu options are presented in a very different way, so does the prompts handling and so on. Hence, developers have to conform to many different UI standards to make them work seamlessly across all platforms. This multiplies the challenges.
Rapid Application Development
Business always demands new and rapid application development process but IT is unable to deliver them. Many custom development projects are unable to keep pace with growing needs. Hence, rapid application development is quickly becoming a necessity.
RAD is well suited for delivering systems with differentiation and innovation. Staying ahead with current market scenarios, Rapid Application Development projects demands a greater level of business involvement. RAD fosters using a methodology to build new applications quickly and emphasizes in releasing frequent prototypes.
Rapid application development tools improve speed and agility of IT teams hence enhances productivity and improves project outcomes. RAD enables IT teams to deliver in days and weeks instead of months and years, therefore, enterprises are trending more towards RAD.
- Reduction of Risks – Quick work allows business to review functionality earlier in the application lifecycle. This helps in avoiding reworking up to greater extent and on time completion of projects.
- Improved Quality – As requirements can be validated based on user feedback, the testing throughout the project lifecycle improves software quality
- Faster time to market – Availability of faster production-ready apps means that it’s going to benefit businesses exponentially.
Wrapper
Such hybrid apps will force upon the popularity of rapid application development tools and low code mobile app development platforms. There are many Rapid Application Development software platforms which do not take much time or skill to create apps. A new team of developers or existing crop of developers need no special training as the above suggested platforms are easy to adopt and use. So that should not worry you.
References: Fiercedeveloper, Solutionsreview, Gartner, Mendix, G2crowd
Ajeet Singh
