Which Mobile Hybrid App is Better For You?

                                             wiki.developerforce.com

Not every app will fit cleanly into a single pattern, they serve as models for understanding the wide range of what’s possible.

Pure Pattern: So-called “pure” hybrid apps consist of a single webview that occupies the entire screen. All the content and navigation controls are implemented in HTML5, and a thin native wrapper exposes native APIs (like Address Book access) to the HTML5 code. PhoneGap (Cordova) apps use this model. Because of the heavy reliance on HTML5, these apps typically have the most code reuse between mobile platforms and require the least level of native programming experience.

Blended Pattern: Blended apps use native components for the main navigation UI (such as the tab bar) but web views for the formatted content. These apps often use multiple web views with native-powered animations between screens. Apple’s App Store app and Google’s Gmail for iOS use this pattern on some screens.

Mullet Pattern: These apps are fully native for early parts of a user flow, such as product browsing, and web-based for later areas like checkout. This is a very common pattern for mobile commerce apps where APIs supporting native screens typically exist for product data but not for the hard to integrate features like checkout and payments. Walmart and Yelp apps for iOS both use this pattern.

Fallback Pattern: In this pattern, the app is mostly native but uses hybrid web views as a fallback for little used or frequently changing content. Facebook’s current app falls under this pattern
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API Pattern: Not all hybrid apps simply render HTML from a server. API-driven hybrid apps get their data from the server in JSON or XML and instantiate that data into HTML within the app.

A good resource is a free e-book on native, HTML5, and hybrid apps that may help with the different approaches to mobile in the enterprise. The staff at Kinvey wrote the book.

http://venturebeat.com/2013/11/13/the-5-hybrid-apps-you-meet-in-heaven-hhhhhh-mobile/