Native or Hybrid: What to Consider When Developing a Mobile App for Business

Those are good points. adamwong246, iteration is certainly faster on hybrid web, and potential migration to native once the dust settles is a clever approach. And as kinj28 mentioned, using a common platform between the mobile app and internal-facing web app is a compelling way to save costs through shared business logic and staffing efficiencies.

Speaking of enterprise, the ability to integrate with disparate data sources in some cases trumps mobile, and the mobile framework choice becomes part of an overall full stack solution (think Appcelerator Cloud Services).

Lots of considerations to weigh in picking a platform.

We have been working on enterprise mobility for last 5 years. we typically categorize business apps in to internal facing or external. this post, looks like has assumed an external facing app scenario. In a typical internal facing app, usual scenarios are transactional in nature and talks to various internal systems. In our experience, hybrid web is a great way to build such applications. while phonegap and cordova wraps your business application in a static way, we work on dynamic wrapping technologies that enables upgrading and adding new hybrid features in a quick and jiffy way.

I've had excellent results starting with a hybrid web app, which gradually transitions to native over the life of the project. We found that any native feature, on any platform, takes 10X as long to develop as web. So we start with mobile web, deploy as a website, and over time, replace the web app with a native app, piece-by-piece.

This works much better on Android, where you can deploy as often as you like and where the user's are used to a lower standard of ux.