The year 2006 saw the beginning of the smartphone era with the launch of the iPhone by Apple. By 2008, Google had launched its answer to Apple's iOS operating system. This new operating system was called Android, and by 2010, it was clear that smartphones running iOS and Android dominantly covered the mobile ecosystem. Fast forward to today, the dominance of iOS and Android is not so different even though Windows for mobile by Microsoft has made some gains on the mobile front. It is fair to say that Android, iOS, and Windows make up the majority of the ecosystem with the first two at the forefront by a large margin.
The launch of the smartphone era also gave birth to the concept of mobile applications. Mobile apps are the medium by which we deliver and obtain most of our content on mobile phones. They are great and everyone with a smartphone pretty much has a number of apps downloaded on their devices to perform specific actions or achieve specific goals. This was massive for developers, and the software vendors also provided tools that enabled developers to create their own third-party mobile apps for users. We refer to these applications, built using the tools provided by the software vendors, as native mobile applications.
As great as mobile apps are, there is a small problem with how they are developed. Firstly, for each mobile development platform, the software vendor provides its own unique set of tools to build applications for its platforms. We know these tools as SDKs. The following table shows how each platform differs in terms of tools and SDK options to create native mobile apps for their ecosystems:
|
Operating system |
SDK |
Programming language |
|---|---|---|
|
iOS |
iOS SDK |
Objective-C/Swift |
|
Android |
Android SDK |
JAVA |
|
Windows for mobile |
Windows SDK |
.NET |
To make a clear statement, we are not trying to downplay the use of native tools. As noted earlier, native tools are great but come with a great cost and time constraint. Firstly, you are unable to build the same app for different platforms with the same set of tools. For the Android version of your app, you will need a team of skilled android developers. For the iOS version of your app, you will need a team of Objective-C or Swift developers to create the iOS version of the same app. Also, there is no code sharing between these two teams, meaning that a feature developed on one platform will have to be completely developed on the other platform again. This is highly inefficient in terms of development and very time consuming.
Another problem is that because you are hiring two separate teams that are completely independent of one another even though they are both trying to create the same thing, you are left with a growing cost. For example, if you decided you wanted to create a Windows for mobile version of your mobile app, you will need to recruit another team of .NET developers and they will have to build everything present on the other existing platforms from scratch since they cannot reuse any of the already built tools.
For a company like Facebook, which makes revenue in the billions, it might make sense to go down the native path as cost and talent for native development would probably not be a part of their concern. However, for the most part, not everyone building or trying to build a mobile app is a company like Facebook. Most people want to get a simple, great, powerful app out there as quick as possible. Furthermore, some of these people want to use their preexisting skill set to build apps for multiple platforms without having to learn new programming languages.
Before mobile applications, web apps ruled the world for the most part. We had more people developing for the web technologies consisting mostly of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. One great thing we got used to with the web was that it was platform independent. This meant that as long as you had a browser application on any device, you were able to interact with any web application without any problem.
So when mobile apps came, it was a big change for most web developers because with mobile apps, each platform was self-dependent, and apps made for one platform would not work for another platform.