Different types of mobile applications

In the modern realm, mobile applications are also called mobile apps. There are thousands of user-friendly apps on the market for most specific needs, starting from chatting, multi-video conferencing, games, health check-ups, gambling, communities, trading, other financial services, and so on and so forth.

One of the interesting future technologies in the mobile apps space is the development of mobile apps running on iOS and Android devices, where the app can listen for signals from beacons in the physical world and react accordingly, called iBeacon.

The apps are broadly categorized into the following types:

• Native apps
• Mobile web apps
• Hybrid apps

Native apps

Native applications that reside in the mobile operating system are pushed/installed through the respective app stores. These apps are typically built using development tools and languages (Xcode and Objective C, Swift for iOS apps, and Android Studio and Java for Android apps) and are designed for a particular platform and can take advantage of all the device features, such as the usage of the camera, GPS, phone contact list, and so on. The following screen capture of a well-known game is a solid example of a native mobile application:

Mobile web apps

Mobile web applications are non-native applications. Most of them are HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS applications with a web interface supporting the native application look and feel. Users first access them as they would access any other web page, and these are mobile-optimized web pages.

These applications became popular when HTML5 came around and people started to utilize the functionality of native applications from browser. The development and testing of these applications are easy since they all have tooling support.

The following screen capture shows one of the banking web applications:

Hybrid apps

Hybrid applications have two definitions. One definition is of a combination of web- based content and native components accessing services on the mobile device, most notably, storing or using storage. Another definition is of a client-server architecture of mobile applications. An example is a mobile enterprise application.

These are web apps built into native mobile framework and take advantage of the cross-compatibility of web technologies, such as HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. The following is a screen capture of a well-known news mobile application, which is an example of a hybrid app:

Note

Why does it matter?

The changes to the programming languages in order to develop applications force developers to maintain multiple code bases. Cyber attackers follow users; the mobile application threat scape has grown significantly grown over the years.