Apache Cordova

Apache Cordova is a technology that lets any web application be packaged as a native mobile application while also providing access to device features. Thanks to Adobe and the open source community, this technology has seen great growth over the years and more and more apps are being built with Cordova. The apps built with Cordova are commonly referred to as hybrid applications. But what is a hybrid app?

A hybrid application in the context of Cordova is actually a web app that lives within the thin container of a native mobile application.

In reality, the only difference between a native mobile app and a web application in terms of what they can do is the fact that the native mobile app has access to the device hardware features.

In truth, a hybrid app is actually a native app that serves up a web application on the phone's web view. It behaves and acts like a normal application and has complete device access, thanks to Cordova.

However, the main advantage that Cordova has over native development techniques is that you only have to maintain one code base, and can use that same code base to build applications for multiple platforms. This was and still is the main selling point of Cordova to date, as with this technique you are provided with a big cost and time saving advantage.

Early hybrid apps

When the first few hybrid apps started rolling out, there were a couple of problems that seemed to persist. The first problem was that a lot of people complained that these hybrid applications did not have the same user interface and user experience as native mobile apps. The major reason for this was that when building a native app, all the building blocks are already provided for you. For example, we have things like pre-provided animations, swipe gestures, tabs, and so on. Hybrid apps failed to provide similar features like these because on the web, all we have is HTML, CSS, and JS. There is no pre-provided component for things like animations, gestures, and tabs.

This meant that pretty much anyone trying to build a hybrid app had to build these features from scratch. This was not very good and different people had different implementations of the same features. As a result, a lot of applications that were built by the hybrid way were not so visually appealing. What we needed was a framework that was centrally maintained that provided us with all the tools we needed to build features that native apps had with web technologies.