How Native Apps can be used in a Web Browser?

So, what are native apps? How are they useful? How their advantages can be brought to a web browser? These are some of the questions that every developer has when we discuss about native apps.

The advantages of mobile friendly apps when it comes to maximum reach, accessibility from various device types and benefits from search, social media, email , affiliates etc are always been tempered by native apps. This leads to better user experience and functionality.

Now days, we can find various technologies are available in the market such as HTML 5 and its ability to tap into various device features like as location, camera as well as the ability to start working offline.

Developers can deliver apps that can offer interactive user experience via the web browser to many such native apps. As a result, these are named as web apps. Due to this reason, companies have started making more of such web apps.

Native Apps vs. Web Apps:

Hence, these are developed sometimes as alternatives or sometimes in addition to native apps which includes various minor apps. Native apps are basically software applications that are written for a single device.

On the other hand, web applications are those that work on all platforms. As a result, web developers need to wait for new standards to come and these can then be implemented by all parties such as browsers, devices, operating systems etc.

Today, developers are free to develop websites with text and images that can be browsed. These can now create interactive apps which performs several tasks. Some examples of web apps are Gmail, PayPal, Quartz and Financial times.

These things have initiated mobile web apps:

1. Integrating HTML 5 with CSS 3 along with interactivity of JavaScript, web developers can easily replicate the mobile friendly, touch optimized interface along with navigation and the immersive, interactive user experience as started by native app developers.
2. Browser APIs are used for websites to interact with various device functions or sensors like as GPS, accelerometer, ambient light detector, microphone, camera, thermometer etc.
3. It brings thousands of tons of capabilities that developers love about native apps like as access to the device location, working offline and sending push notifications. W3C web standards is creating these standards and then these are taken into action by various browser companies like FireFox, Opera, Google Chrome etc that can be used on various devices to access the web.
4. The speed depends on the process which further is based on capability. Few of the remarkable web app innovations as on Dec 2015 are as follows:
• Location: Geo location notifies the website about the current location of any user. This is available on every browser. The first one to ship this was Safari. Now, IE also possesses Geo location.
• Working Offline: With service worker, one can activate a new generation of offline web applications. These are available in current versions of Google Chrome, Opera, Android browser and Android Chrome.
• Camera: Get user media is an app that offers access to the camera. For instance, video streaming or web RTC calling. This can be used on Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Android browser as well as Chrome for Android.
• Push notifications: Here, we can say that W3C notifications are complete and this feature is available on Firefox, Chrome, and Opera. It allows any publisher to send a notification to any device of the web app user irrespective of whether the app is in use or not.
• Audio: Web Audio API is yet another engaging feature that is useful for web developers so that they can do some practical stuff with sound. This is important for games.
• Full Screen: The complete API allows a browser to take over the full screen of the device. With iOs safari and Android browser; its adoption is little more occasional.

Take Away:

So, these were some of the web apps that can be used easily on web browsers. Wish to know more about such web app innovations then stay connected with Softqube Technologies; a well known web development company in India.