Imagine having a slick looking mobile app (micro app) for your business or for yourself! Encapsulating promotional videos image galleries to make you stand out from the crowd. An easier way to immediately show off your company, YOU or mico subject.
What are Micro Apps?
Micro Apps are small mobile applicatons that are not installed on a phone you visit them just like a website and they are different to a website in that they are targeted at a single piece of functionality.
Here is an example of a micro app that has a purpose for you to calculate a Antigua car rental cost depending on duration and type of car.
What are Native Apps?
Native apps are apps that must be installed and they run directly on the phone operating system. There are distinctly different to apps which run in the browser of the device. It may sound naff that an app runs in a browser yet you wouldn't know as a user. Phone browsers and apps that run in them offer some not all the functionality of native apps for example access to the camera and microphone. Also there is going to be a speed reduction which may not be noticeable if the app is a click and react kind of app rather than say a graphics intense game that is not to say some games won't work well, if the game has need of a 3d engine there are javascript ones (hybrid apps use javascript) but if you have many objects in the view needing calculations then a native app would be the way to go. One important point is that if you are going native then you will need to develop a codebase for each kind of phone operating system. The reason being is that you don't know what device your user will be using so you need 3 development teams trying to make the same experience across the 3 phone ecosystems. So also then you need to market the native apps across the different platforms. Apple store, google play, amazon etc..
Apple (iphones ipads etc); Swift, Objective C [more]
Android (more phones and devices than any other such as nexus samsung etc); Java
Windows (surface etc); c#, Visual Basic , c++
What are Hybrid Apps?
Hybrid Apps are very attractive because they leverage the browser. Browsers are an awesome invention in the way that Java virtual machines are. What are they both doing that is so great? Well see the 3 operating systems needing 3 coding teams..lots of work. This very page is being shown to you on your device grace of a browser, without the browser and html we would not be able to show ordered content and media such as images. The java virtual machine which runs on multiple operating systems alows the user to render things equally in Java. The flash player is another example of a container type box thats job is to allow the operating system below to play a standard kind of code. So developers write one piece of code that will then work anywhere. The browser in your phone for example I bet is the most used thing on your phone.
So you can write web apps using javascript html and css. The one codebase allows a single team to develop a single application. So how does this run on all the phones? Through the browser. But a hybrid app takes a browser and your web app and whips it into a self contained package for each of the mobile ecosystems so in fact you get to instal it and run it just like a native app. Indeed there is needed 3 different builds but the final end app is a single codebase.
Lets get some more visual information with an image helping us to understand this more thanks to MDG Advertising. In fact it might make you less interested in a web app as you see the stats for useage. I don't think this is very relevant information and I feel the data is skewed as we spend probably most of this time in instagram and facebook apps. You are not competing with them. Never forget the one really cool advantage of a web app is there is no install it's just there and running. If anything it's the slightly clunky mechanism for getting an icon to tap which starts the app as essentially it's a 'website' without the browser chrome.
