What Are the Different Types of Mobile Applications?
What makes smartphones different from traditional mobile phones? The answer is mobile applications. Smartphones have a wide range of built-in applications, not to mention the external apps that you can download and install on them. With these mobile applications, a smartphone can perform tasks that only a desktop computer can do before.
There are various types of mobile applications used today. Becoming familiar with them will help you with your search for the right app. Here are some of the most common types of mobile applications.
Native Mobile Applications
Native mobile application pertains to applications that you can directly from your smartphone. Usually these are OS/platform based applications that you can buy from a mobile store or download from the internet, and then install on the phone.
Calendars, built-in browsers, calculators, and office applications are some of the most common types of native applications. Native versions of social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter also falls in this category. The GPS apps that allow you to find maps, location of friends, hotels, etc. are also mobile applications.
Since native mobile apps runs directly from your smartphone, they can take advantage of the capabilities the hardware, allowing them to perform complex functions that web-based applications cannot do. In case you are planning to use mobile app to improve the efficiency and productivity of your workforce, it is advisable to hire app developers to create a native app for you. As mentioned earlier, this type of apps can perform better when it comes to complicated tasks. However, you need to make sure that your developer is capable of producing apps that runs on multiple platforms.
Web-based Applications
This type of mobile app does not run directly on smartphones, but on the web browser on the handheld device. You do not have to install them on your mobile phone, since they run on web-hosted servers. Web-based applications do not require multiple platforms, because they can run on different types of operating systems.
Social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter are excellent examples of web-based applications, and you can access them through your browser. This type of mobile app allows you to do simple activities like online gaming, email and chatting, blogging and file sharing. Although web-based applications cannot do complex tasks, its technology. In fact, the introduction of HTML 5 allow web-based apps to access the device’s hardware to improve functionality and give way to faster response. Therefore, if you are planning to hire Scottish app developers to produce a web-based app for you, make sure that they take advantage of HTML 5.
Customization Is Important in Mobile App Development
Customisation is very important if you are planning to use mobile apps to improve customer service, or boost the productivity of your business. Every business has different requirements. Applications that work on a particular business may not work on yours. Therefore, if you are having a mobile application created for your business, you need to make sure that it will satisfy your business needs. This would require careful planning, research and strategy.
