Nowadays everyone wants a splendid success in the eCommerce Industry. The mobile application is contributing a superior role to maintain your existence in the eCommerce business world. The existence depends on which mobile technology you are using or you are going to use.
First, let’s take a quick overview of the Native app, Web app, and Hybrid app.
Native App: The native app is built precisely for a specific mobile operating system. It can be accessed only from the dedicated app store like Google Play Store for Andriod applications and App Store for iOS applications. The technologies which are used for Android and iOS applications are Java and Objective-C/Swift respectively. According to Forbes, the Android and iOS mobile users are 79.4% and 16.4% respectively in 2015.
Hybrid App: The technology which is used for Hybrid app is HTML5, CSS, and Javascript. As the nomenclature suggests, a hybrid application is a class of a cross between a native mobile application and a web application. It is built using web technology like a web app but contains some native mobile programming. The most important disadvantage of the hybrid app is that the app still runs in a browser and the fastness of the app depends on the internet connection.
Web App: Web application is the ‘App-ification’ of the website. A web application or “web app” is a software program that runs on a web server. Web App is not that which are launched by your operating system. It must be accessed through a web browser.
Why Native Mobile Application ?
The Native mobile app provides the more robust user experience as compared to Hybrid or Web App. It’s faster and easy to use from the customers’ point of view. It provides in-app functionality like user can use call or chat without leaving the app. The most advanced feature of the Native app that it does not always required the internet connection. The user can also use the mobile application in offline mode. If the internet coverage is poor then the user can still use the app.
Push Notifications have a huge role to engage your customers to your mobile store. The native mobile application supports the feature Push Notification which is an essential feature of the mobile application. It helps to increase the customers’ engagement over the mobile store. Push Notifications allows your app to let users know when new offers become available. This features also maintain your brand consistency.
There are some major benefits of the push notification:
-> Real-Time Notifications
-> Brand Consistency
-> Fast delivery & fast response
-> Engaging customers
-> Works in Standby mode
You can also see the benefits of push notifications by clicking here.
The major influence of a native mobile application is that users prefer to spend more time on mobile devices. According to Flurry Analytics (Yahoo!), users spend as much as 90% of their time on mobile devices in apps .
I would say that you can save the time and money to build a Hybrid app but you will not get a better user interface (UI) as compared to the Native app. A hybrid app can never meet the level of creative user experience that you get in a native app. If you want to build an excellent user experience, the native app would be the better option. The native app provides the user-friendly and easy navigation experiences to your customers.
If we discuss the native app vs web app then the native app will always win. The native app users are much much higher than the web app users in the world. The simple logic is that mobile web app pages have higher loading time as compared to the native app so that no one wants to waste their valuable time. Higher loading time reduces the customers’ patience. Increasing the loading time is proportional to the decreasing your conversion rate.
If an eCommerce Store is making $1,00,000 per day then 1-second page delay will cost you around $2.5 M in lost sales every year (source – KISSmetrics).
For Web App, there is no specific regulatory authority to control the quality standard of the Web App. Also, the Web App has the limited access to the operating system’s features. The Native app has the familiar or common installation process. The native apps are easily available on Google Play and App Store and users can easily discover the native apps as compared to the web apps.