Hybrid or Native apps

App Development
1

Hi there!

Early stages of developing a couple of ideas in different business sectors but with what seems a common problem - ability for a mobile app user to access their latest information on their mobile device.

So Scenario 1 is this:
A business providing services to its customers.
The interactions with its customers generates informational updates to the customer’s account, incorporates billing, access to reports in pdf format, event reminders and many other features. I need a mobile app user to be able to access their account information etc whenever they want to - just like a person accesses their online banking and can perform a large number of activities.

I am assuming that this scenario will be best served by a hybrid application environment. That being said, I’m assuming a “backend” platform will be required to manage each customers interaction with the business.

Scenario 2 is basically the same in terms of needing a “backend” to manage customer interaction with the business. This app backend will need to also incorporate instant messaging and perhaps some kind of version of being able to be “friends” with other people.

Personally, I’d rather be coding once and have the functionality distributable via the App store and the equivalent on the Android side as well.

So - I’m here to ask about opinions on:

  1. approaching this development effort
  2. hybrid frameworks
  3. best practices to be mindful of when dealing with real time customer/account functionality
  4. anything else that may be related and you think could be useful

Thanks for taking the time to read my post!
Look forward to some insights!

Cheers,
Steve

2

Welcome to the community Steve!

I don’t know what you mean by “hybrid environment?”
Like mobile app and website?

Yes, you need some database that holds all this user information. That would be the “backend”

This will take a lot of effort!! You have lots of “moving parts,” with an account, billing, reports, reminders, etc

So yes what you’re wanting is a hybrid app to develop a single codebase for both iOS and Android. This forum is dedicated to native iOS dev, so we can’t help as much on the coding aspect of this, but here’s some options.
Flutter or React Native are a cross-platform framework, to use one codebase and deploy to both iOS and Android, however this does have its drawbacks too. It’s not a “one size fits all”

I’d need more detail about what this info is. You’d mange it like any other data you get from the user

Other thoughts

This is a hefty app, that does a lot of things. If you’re interested in learning to code, go for it! But it will take quite some time to really put this all together. If you have the ability, paying someone to do this would be the fastest.

Regarding cross-platform, yes it’s nice to have one codebase for multiple platforms, but it is not a silver bullet solution by any means. One thing to consider is where are your users? Mostly iOS or mostly android? Also while yes you can have a single codebase, you will still generally have some stuff that’s platform specific code.

It would probably be fine for your app, cause you aren’t considering using stuff like maps, Bluetooth, accelerometer, etc (that you mentioned), which are best on native platforms.

But your main choices are Flutter, which is a framework by Google, written in a programming language called Dart, or React Native (which is cross-platform, having the word “native” in the title like they did is confusing)
But this is a web framework, React, that can be used to make mobile apps, so you’ll use JavaScript, but should also be familiar with React