Developing your own app is an important thing to get right, whether it’s for use within your own business, client-facing, or for the general public. One of the first decisions to make when developing an app is the choice whether to develop for the browser (web app), or for native use (downloaded to computer or mobile).

The new flavour for web apps on mobile is called Progressive Web Apps - although we’ll cover this topic at a later date.

What is a native app and what is a web app?

Native apps are software applications that the user needs to download and install on their system (computer or mobile device) before running them. Web apps are software applications that run in the browser (e.g. Chrome, Firefox, Safari) and behave as you’d expect a native app to behave - but without needing to install anything on your system.

A web app is “an app within an app.” This means it can only operate within the environment provided by the browser. A native app can operate within the environment of the full operating system it runs on.

Web apps in 2021

Whereas once if you wanted a fully-functional piece of software you’d need to build a native app, now there isn’t much that web apps can’t do.

Take, for instance, Canva. Canva is a graphic design app that’s sort of a Photoshop-lite, a tool to create your own designs. It was created fully as a browser app, one of the first of its kind to be able to replicate many of the features of Photoshop, all without a download necessary.

However, the way that web apps and native apps work is very different.

The benefits of web apps over native apps

If you decide to build a web app, then it means that it can be used on any browser. A user can log in to the app from their home computer, their work computer, a Windows laptop, or a Mac. It can be used on a tablet or a mobile if the web app is designed to be responsive for mobile devices. There is no need to install anything, they just open their browser from anywhere, on any machine, and away they go.

This makes web apps highly portable. When people now use a range of different devices, and upgrade fairly regularly or swap and change often, this makes web apps a great choice for when you know your users are going to be on the go.

A web app can be a great idea if you only need access to certain functionality (for instance, camera and microphone, file uploads), and you don’t need your app to do a million different things at once, or load huge databases. It requires careful development on the client (browser) side and considered interactions with the server side (back end, stored somewhere else in the world).

The way that browser side data is cached and stored is changing, which means that we can do a lot more with web apps without them operating too slowly, however it requires very careful engineering, as well as testing across a range of browsers.

The benefits of native apps over web apps

Native apps allow you to have full use of a system’s resources, which can include disk utilisation, external device access such as to an external scanner or soundboard, or access to other files or applications on the system.

The main (current) downfall of web apps is how powerful they are. Because web apps operate through the browser, they only ever have access to the resources available to the browser itself. They are also limited to the caching ability of the browser in terms of storage and recall.

This can also make some web app functionality only available in certain browsers.

Example: If you are using Google Docs instead of Microsoft Word, and you are not using the Chrome browser, you’ll notice that if you left click to bring up the document menu and select Paste, you cannot do so (you can only use the Ctrl+V option). This is because of the way the browser stores Clipboard information. Chrome is setup to allow this functionality, but Firefox (at the time of print) is not.

This means that native apps have the ability to be far more powerful than web apps. Because everything can be downloaded to the machine, and data requested from servers only when absolutely necessary, there doesn’t need to be a great deal of engineering ‘magic’ to make native apps speedy.

The verdict?

The question of whether to choose a web app or a native app for your development project really depends on the scope and functionality of the application you are trying to build. While web apps are a great, portable solution, they may require some serious engineering and longer development times to optimise loading times, etc. They also still aren’t generally ideal for ‘heavyweight’ software applications, although this may change in the future.

Need help in deciding whether a web app or a native app is the right choice for your software development project? We aren’t just coders - we’re also able to scope out your project and give you the answers you’re looking for on how to get started, what you’ll need, and approximately how long it’ll take. Contact us at CodeFirst to get your app project started.