Mobile Web or Native for mobile applications – Hybrid is the answer?

I see several companies trying to choose between native applications and mobile web applications. Native applications offer better user experience at the cost of higher maintenance costs to develop and support applications for multiple proprietary devices. There are commercial products available that promise to blend the differences between proprietary device platforms using a single code base. However, these products require you to adopt their own proprietary way to develop the mobile application. Mobile web is not as attractive as native applications when it comes to user experience. New standards such as HTML5 are promising and it is not a standard yet and not all the browsers support it fully and in the same way.

There is interest in the use of hybrid tools (e.g. Titanium) that help develop applications by leveraging both options – i.e. develop parts of the application using mobile web and other performance-heavy parts using native app methods. Such tools tend to reduce the device specific code content in mobile applications by leveraging mobile web wherever appropriate although complexities behind supporting hybrid applications that mix and match mobile web and native code are yet to be understood.

I think that proprietary mobile device platforms are here to stay and will actually reverse the benefits from open server consolidation (for example, migration from proprietary UNIX versions to open versions of UNIX that can run on proprietary hardware platforms). However, software tools and products for mobile application development that commit themselves to open source and standards to help minimize the differences between proprietary device platforms and make it easy for developers to support mobile applications on multiple devices are likely to succeed in the future.

---