DHH, Founder and CTO at Basecamp, wrote an excellent post describing the “hybrid sweet spot” approach that they have taken with mobile versions of Basecamp. He describes the tradeoffs between performance and developer productivity, and the productivity benefits that they have seen in their latest generation of the Basecamp app by going 90% web/10% native. This approach would not have made sense in 2010 when the iPhone 3GS was the targeted device due to subpar performance. Today, the acceptable performance gap between mobile and PC is much much narrower.
At Mediafly, we wholeheartedly agree. Our enterprise customers are releasing incredible mobile apps on our Interactives Framework; apps that mobilize their sales and production workforces. Leveraging our Interactives Framework has allowed our customers to dramatically reduce their total cost of creation and maintenance, by:
- Building with modern web tools (HTML, CSS, JavaScript), vs. building in native code (Objective-C, Java, C#)
- Ensuring everything is synced for offline use, offered by default in Mediafly apps
- Inheriting best-in-class security for free with the platform
- Having access to deep reporting capabilities out of the box
- Allowing native navigation to be controlled by the Interactive itself
We continue to improve the platform to increase speed, improve access to underlying features, and simplify development.
In our business, two additional factors move the needle towards hybrid apps for Mediafly:
- While performance is important for any app, the cost to obtain that performance matters more. If you are building an app for millions of consumers, and your offering is simple and reasonably static, you should invest in a 100% native app. If your app is built for hundreds or thousands of users, as in the case of our customers, the benefit of a slight performance improvement per customer isn’t a validated cost.
- We can’t (yet) predict what customers are going to do with the Interactives Framework. So, our goal is to build a general capability that offers lots of opportunities to build great things with our customer’s developers and/or our partners.
Thanks for reading, and also make sure to check out our latest blog post to learn more about what the Mediafly Interactives Framework is all about.
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