Native applications are built and designed for specific mobile devices. They install directly on the hardware after being downloaded from app stores or marketplaces. These applications are designed to be compatible with native features of the target device hardware and can work as standalone entities. An important drawback, however, is that users need to continually update the app.
Web apps are accessible via the mobile device web browser and are not downloaded onto the user's device. They can only access a limited number of the device's native features and update themselves without user intervention. This development option uses languages such as JavaScript, HTML 5, or CSS3 but no standardization or SDK is available. Web apps may also lead to higher maintenance cost across multiple mobile platforms.
From a user point of view, both options look...