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One of the most intriguing challenges in mobile apps development is its fragmentation with respect to mobile platforms (e.g., Android, Apple iOS, Windows Phone). Large companies like IBM and Adobe and a growing community of developers advocate hybrid mobile apps development as a possible solution to mobile platforms fragmentation.

The mobile apps market now counts more than two-millions apps, downloaded billions of times per year from a number of dedicated app stores (with Google Play Store and Apple App Store as clear market dominators). However, code written for one mobile platform (e.g., the Java code of an Android app) cannot be used on another (e.g., the Objective-C code of an Apple iOS app), making the development and maintenance of native apps for multiple platforms one of the major technical challenges affecting the mobile development community.

Hybrid mobile apps are developed by using standard web technologies (i.e., HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) and all service requests to the Platform API are mirrored by a cross-platform JavaScript API. In this context, a hybrid development framework (e.g., Apache Cordova) can be defined as a software component that allows developers to create a cross-platform web-based mobile apps by providing (i) a native wrapper for containing the web-based code, and (ii) a generic JavaScript API that bridges all the service requests from the web-based code to the corresponding platform API.

And most important: HMA’s do not need to be downloaded from an app store!

Source: Hybrid Mobile Apps in the Google Play Store: An Exploratory Investigation Multiple Authors