Hybrid mobile applications. Are they the future?

Question

Mobile development

Good afternoon!
Yesterday I watched a presentation of one person who talked about the fact that a young but dynamically developing direction is now appearing on the market - hybrid mobile applications. He talked about the fact that having a framework you can develop mobile applications without knowledge of such languages ​​as:
Java
Object C
C#

The essence of this development is that you need to have a person who knows HTML, CSS, JavaScript . Until yesterday evening, I did not even know about this direction. And I decided to ask here a question, are there people here who are engaged in this direction and where they get information.

Answer 1

This is not a silver bullet, but in principle it solves some of the problems, sometimes you can completely abandon native development. Although the topic is not new, it makes sense to discuss only solutions that have appeared relatively recently (crosswalk, intel xdk, framework7). Before that, everything was slow and html5 applications eventually earned a bad name.
Short answer: Yes, html5 application can already replace the native one in some cases, because with the right technologies it will turn out to be quite close to the native one.
There are subtleties. Many people think that Cordova / PhoneGap is the very framework in which lies the secret of performance or brakes of the final application. Actually there are 2 different things:
Cordova/PhoneGap is a framework that will build html5 app into apk etc. In fact, this is just a constructor that does not affect the performance of the final application in any way. It allows you to take an html5 application, add plugins to work with the camera / gps / advertising, and eventually get an analog of the native one. But it so happened that almost all public examples from the phonegap collection are slow, and therefore many people think that html5 is slow.
The fact is that there are frameworks like cordova, and there are html5 frameworks and these are different things, and they cannot be put on the same line. By itself, cordova is not slow or fast, it works the way and only the way an html5 application works (which you can easily run just in the browser, and clicking "add to desktop" in the browser will work as a standalone application). Accordingly, if the html5 framework is fast and responsive, then the difference with the native application will be negligible.
Second moment. Since an html5 application is just html+js, and it runs inside a webview, the speed of the application also depends on the speed of the webview engine. Let's say that on ios everything is fine with this, but on android it is good only starting from version 5.x. On older versions of android, webview is very slow.
This problem with the slow webview was quite successfully solved by Intel by introducing the crosswalk project. When using crosswalk, the standard webview is replaced with the latest version of chromium, which means support for new features, more fluidity, speed, etc.
Of course, the fresher the crosswalk, the faster and more stable the final html5 application works.
Thus, having solved the problem with the performance of the html5 engine, you can still stumble upon the problem of a slow implementation of the html5 framework itself.
In fact, the problem is that most of the html5 applications on phonegap are made on jquery mobile, a very slow framework, but very common, because of this, everyone sees very slow monsters in the presented html5 applications.
There are 2 very fast html5 frameworks (according to subjective tests, framework7 wins in speed and smoothness), these are framework7 and ionic - they solve many problems of brakes, delays, sticking inherent in the standard use of js.
Accordingly, for example, using framework7, response time of clicks, reactions to swipes, etc. will be the same as in the native application. Both frameworks contain a set of features, reactions to events typical for applications, as well as a set of all standard and advanced components that will be required during development, and which are connected with a couple of lines in the html file in the right place. They already have built-in styles, as a result, all components and the application as a whole look like native (one to one) ios8 or material design, no foreignness. However, they are easy to customize via css.
A little more details can be found in the article "Fast cross-platform HTML5 application on Framework7" - habrahabr.ru/post/257889 or similar ones (for example, about ionic) in the same
place. 15% worse than a similar native solution. If you now recompile with a fresh crosswalk (in intel xdk, by the way, this is even quite simple, just press build and select crosswalk), then the difference will be even less noticeable.
So, it is not necessary to immediately dismiss this direction, you just need to be prepared for slightly different problems than when developing a native application.

Answer 2

This direction is not young at all. And for the time that exists, it "shot". For prototypes, that's it. I used to study interest. In a short time, a simple application was made in (HTML, CSS, JavaScript), people became interested, everything was rewritten in java.

Answer 3

they will live, because there will always be someone who will be led by the opportunity to save money and make it for all platforms at the price of one application.
in fact, it will be like that sometime, but not in this five-year period and it’s not a fact that it is js / html (although who knows) ─ on android it’s all terribly stupid and lags, on aple everything is much better, but if done for one platform, then natively develop faster.
presentations are needed to interest, and the words are young, etc., just marketing

Answer 4

I understand if it was about ReactNative, but Phonegap or Cordova is just a quiet horror.

Answer 5

Look towards PhoneGap for example. Maybe there are newer developments ...
Now even widgets in Windows, Mac OS are made using HTML5 + JavaScript, and you are talking about mobile applications ...

Answer 6

I also watched this presentation yesterday. The author then said about some framework that it freezes wildly on Android 4.4 and higher ... I think this is the tip of the iceberg and performance is not so good there.

Answer 7

Behind such applications is the distant past - google facebook switches to native

Answer 8

Pay attention to these:
https://www.nativescript.org/
https://www.nativescript.org/
Everything else slows down. And it's not the same as PhoneGap and Cordova.
Games on this should not be written, but applications can be completely. And it will not be braking ***nom.

Answer 9

I will try to give a simple comparison with a bicycle (which has already been invented).
Cordova is like a hybrid Chinese Auchan two-suspension. It seems to be going, like and attractive. But there are more problems than benefits.
Nativ is a reliable strong brand name like CUBE or Bianchi.