Android App Development

Little Explanation of Mobile App

Mobile apps are move away from the integrated software systems generally found on PCs. Instead, each app provides limited and isolated functionality such as game, calculator or mobile web browsing. Although apps may have avoided multitasking because of the limited hardware resources of the early mobile devices, their specificity is now part of their desirability because they allow consumers to hand-pick what their device are able to do. The simplest mobile take PC-based applications and port them to a mobile device. As mobile apps become more robust, this technique is somewhat lacking. A more sophisticated approach involves developing specifically for the mobile environment, taking advantage of both its limitations and advantages. For Example; Apps that use location-based features are inherently built from the ground up with an eye to mobile given that you don’t have the same concept location on a PC.

There are different types of Apps:

Web App

Web App stored on a remote server and delivered over the internet through o browser. Web apps are not real apps; they are really websites that, in many ways, look and feel like native applications. They are run by a browser and typically written in HTML5. Users first access them as they would access any web page: they navigate to a special URL and then have the option of “installing” them on their home screen by creating a bookmark to that page.

In contrast, a mobile web app is software that uses technologies such as JavaScript or HTML5 to provide interaction, navigation, or customization capabilities. These programs run within a mobile device’s web browser. This means that they’re delivered wholly on the fly, as needed, via the internet; they are not separate programs that get stored on the user’s mobile device. Web apps became really popular when HTML5 came around and people realized that they can obtain native-like–functionality in the browser. Today, as more and more sites use HTML5, the distinction between web apps and regular web pages has become blurry. Mobile web apps can be designed to run reasonably well via almost any smart mobile web browser — from the full-featured browsers such as the ones available for iPhones and Android phones, to the mid-range browsers such as you see on many BlackBerry phones.

Native App

Native App has been developed for use on a particular platform or device.A native mobile app is a Smartphone application that is coded in a specific programming language, such as Objective C for iOS and Java for Android operating systems. Native mobile apps provide fast performance and a high degree of reliability. They also have access to a phone’s various devices, such as its camera and address book. In addition, users can use some apps without an Internet connection. However, this type of app is expensive to develop because it is tied to one type of operating system, forcing the company that creates the app to make duplicate versions that work on other platforms. Most video games are native mobile apps.

Usually, when people hear “Mobile App” they assume you mean Native App. This is a program that runs on a handheld device ( iPhone, tablet, etc) which has a “smart” operating system which supports standalone software and can connect the internet via wifi or a wireless carrier network. Usually people download native mobile apps from app stores such as the apple app store or the Android market. A Native app can only be “Native” to one type of mobile operating system: iOS, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, Windows phone, WebOS, etc. If you want to also make your app experience available to Android or Blackberry users, you will need to develop and maintain a separate piece of software. That gets complicated and expensive. Companies that are looking to promote themselves to the Smartphone market have other options beyond native mobile apps:

1. Hybrid App: This type of application has cross-platform compatibility but can still access a phone’s hardware. It is developed using platforms such as Sencha, PhoneGap and Mosync.
2. Dedicated Web App: A website that is tailored to function on a mobile device. These are tailored to a specific platform and will not work on other smartphones or feature phones.
3. Generic Mobile App: A mobile website that will work with all mobile phones.

In the early stages of the Smartphone market, most apps were tailored to the iPhone. However, the market share for Android phones grew, thus, the need for cross-platform functionality became an issue.

Hybrid App

Hybrid Apps are like native apps, run on the device, and are written with web technologies (HTML5, CSS and JavaScript). Hybrid apps run inside a native container, and leverage the device’s browser engine (but not the browser) to render the HTML and process the JavaScript locally. A web-to-native abstraction layer enables access to device capabilities that are not accessible in Mobile Web applications, such as the accelerometer, camera and local storage.

Hybrid, by definition is anything derived from heterogeneous sources, or composed of elements of different or incongruous kinds. A hybrid app is one that is written with the same technology used for websites and mobile web implementations, and that is hosted or runs inside a native container on a mobile device. It is the marriage of web technology and native execution.

Often, companies build hybrid apps as wrappers for an existing web page; in that way, they hope to get a presence in the app store, without spending significant effort for developing a different app. Hybrid apps are also popular because they allow cross-platform development: that is, the same HTML code components can be reused on different mobile operating systems, reducing significantly the development costs. Tools such as PhoneGap and Sencha Touch allow people to design and code across platforms, using the power of HTML.