Native applications
A native application, as already explained, is a non-web application (by non-web application, we mean something that is not supposed to be browser-based, but still uses the REST or SOAP protocols for client-server interaction) written for a specific operating system that runs side by side with other applications on that operating system. Nowadays, native applications run mostly on mobile platforms such as iOS and Android, but it is very common to encounter native applications running on Windows as Win32 and Store applications, among other things.
It’s rare to find a native application that does not interact with external APIs to implement its business logic and therefore, it’s also common that these applications require an access token to securely communicate with such external services.
As we will appreciate in the rest of this chapter, native applications have many similarities to SPAs. This is because both of them interact with APIs located...