About Hybrid App development and hybrid App development

About Hybrid App development and hybrid App development

I. Concepts

Hybrid App development, as its name implies, is a development model. It refers to the development of an App. Some features are built using native and some functions are built using html5. The English name is Hybrid App.

The hybrid App development model has appeared a few years ago, but it started to become popular at the end of 2014. It has become popular in 2016 and will be a prosperous year in 2017, now, even bank apps are being developed in hybrid mode, such as Zhaoxing bank and China Construction Bank.

 

Ii. Advantages and Disadvantages

The biggest advantage of hybrid development is that it saves cost and time and shortens the App development cycle.

I personally think there are two major disadvantages: performance is not good, and compatibility is poor.

However, with the popularity of Android 5.0 + and the popularity of iOS 9.0 +, performance defects and compatibility problems are declining. That is to say, if Android supports a minimum version starting from Android 5.0 on any day, the minimum supported version of iOS starts from 9.0, so the disadvantages of mixed App development will obviously decrease, and this day will come from the end of 2017 to the beginning of 2018.

 

Iii. tools and frameworks

Some development tools and frameworks for hybrid development have been available for a long time, such as AppCan and PhoneGap (Cordova). They all advocate one-stop development. To put it simply, A pure html5 developer can develop and publish Android and iOS apps without the need for specialized Android and iOS developers. Although it seems that the development process is very fast and simple, it is a headache when you encounter problems and special requirements. In addition, the framework itself also consumes a certain amount of performance, in Android 5.0 and iOS 9.0 or lower, the developed apps are very weak. Therefore, in my experience, we do not recommend looking for several html5 developers to start "doing big things ".

 

4. How to implement hybrid Development

As mentioned above, it is impractical to find several pure html5 developers to start hybrid development. This is mainly because: 1. Not all apps can meet their needs simply by using html5. Some special scenarios and special pages and high-performance pages require native support, 2. Some complex algorithms/important information are implemented and managed using html5.

In summary, I think most hybrid apps will work in the following directions in the future:

1. Strive to make the native part account for 20%, and the html5 part accounts for 80%.

2. Native implementation: storage or communication of the main App interface framework (which may contain startup pages), pages requiring high performance (such as chat/video call pages), and complex algorithms/important information.

In the past two years (2017 ~ 2018), most apps can only achieve about 35% native and about 65% html5.

The distribution of front-end developers in a hybrid App project is about. 5, that is:

Small Project: 1 Android, 1 iOS, 2 ~ 3 html5

Medium and large projects: 2 Android, 2 iOS, 4 ~ 6 html5

 

V. Impact of hybrid Development

1. In the next few years, the demand for Android and iOS developers will gradually decrease, while the demand for html5 developers will grow, and developers from Android or iOS to html5 will gradually become more and more popular.

2. the html development process will be accelerated and more html frameworks and tools will emerge.

 

Some mixed development experience will be written in the future

 

Original essay, reprinted to indicate the source.