The State of Hybrid Mobile Development

Hybrid development, or the approach of building native apps using Web technologies, has gone through its fair share of highs and lows. But, despite high-profile abandonments from the likes of Facebook and LinkedIn, hybrid development continues to be used by a substantial number of developers. For instance, a VisionMobile 2014 study of over 7,000 developers found that “15% of app developers use HTML5 beyond the browser, via hybrid apps or HTML5-to-native tools.” PhoneGap touts that the library “has been downloaded over 1 million times and is being used by over 400,000 developers.” But what do those numbers mean for the future of hybrid? Is hybrid as a platform growing or shrinking? Is performance still a limiting factor for hybrid apps? In this talk we’ll attempt to answer those questions. We’ll look at where the hybrid ecosystem is today, and where it’s heading.