Hybrid vs Native…What About a Third Option?
The Hybrid vs. Native mobile discussion has always struck me as a little absurd. The majority of native mobile applications, including well-known third-party ones created by Apple and Google, combine Native UI controls with Web Views. The Web View component wouldn’t exist or be so commonly utilised if this wasn’t such a typical use case. I frequently wonder if an app qualifies as native or not depending on the proportion of native UI elements and web views it has. That has always struck me as being highly subjective. Ionic has typically focused more on the hybrid/web side, as you might expect. With hooks into native functionality, Ionic apps often employ Capacitor to act as a host for a web app running in a native mobile app shell. This suggests that these apps have complete access to native UI and SDKs. Because of this, these hybrid applications can utilise as much or as little native UI as they like because they are now considered true native apps. However, the majority of the ap...