Jan 24, 2024
Native Mobile App Testing: A Step by Step Guide
Kobiton Team
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There are many different types of applications in the world today, and it’s important to understand the main differences between them – regardless of which specific different operating systems they happen to be for. For example, some apps are specific to Android devices; some are mobile-only; some are used in a combination of mobile and desktop applications.
Fortunately, Kobiton solutions are just around the corner. Our skilled professionals are always able to make the challenging world of tech solutions more manageable with expert guidance and top-notch tools to help any organization prosper in our new digital landscape.
In this post, we’ll be covering web apps vs. native mobile apps vs. hybrid apps, and how user experience might be impacted by the type of app they happen to be using.
What is a Web App?
First things first: let’s define what we mean by “web app.” Think of it as a website that happens to be just as helpful (and acting similar to) an app. Often, differences between the two are minimized — easing user experience in the process.
The best web apps bring users back to specific websites for services and information, rather than relying solely on traditional apps. It applies to both iOS and Android testing practices.
Examples of Web Apps
So, what are a few examples? You’ll be happy to learn that some of the world’s biggest companies operate as web apps: like Gmail and Netflix. Users interact with these organizations in a website-based manner.
Advantages of Web Apps
One of the most beneficial advantages of web applications is that they’re cost-effective and easy to develop. Then, deployment is usually accelerated, compared to other types of apps. The products or services are accessible on desktop computers, laptops, and mobile devices. From a developer’s perspective, one of the coolest factors is that routine updates can be completed automatically.
Disadvantages of Web Apps
There are also disadvantages of web apps; chief among them, that they cannot be used offline. Security for web applications can also be problematic. The potential of compromised performance and user experience has also been noted.
What About Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)?
A Progressive Web App is a web app with a few extra capabilities that make it feel more like an installed app. It’s still built with HTML, CSS and JavaScript and still runs in the browser engine, but users can add it to their home screen, and it can keep working when the connection drops.
Two pieces make that possible: a web app manifest, which tells the device the app’s name, icon and how it should launch, and a service worker, a background script that can cache files and data so the app loads offline.
- What PWAs add: home-screen installation, offline or low-connectivity support for cached content, and push notifications (on iOS, only after the user adds the app to the home screen).
- What they still can’t do: reach most of the hardware and background capabilities native apps use, and behave identically everywhere — support is broadest in Chrome on Android and narrower in Safari on iOS.
- Distribution: PWAs can be listed on Google Play using a Trusted Web Activity, but Apple’s App Store generally won’t accept an app that is only a wrapped website.
Starbucks and Pinterest are well-known examples: both built PWAs to give mobile web users a faster, app-like experience without requiring a download.
What is a Native Mobile App?
Today, most new Android development happens in Kotlin, which Google has recommended as the preferred language for Android since 2019; Java is still supported and common in older codebases. On iOS, Swift has largely replaced Objective-C for new work. Both platforms also have modern declarative UI toolkits SwiftUI for iOS and Jetpack Compose for Android alongside their older UI frameworks.
So, what is a native app? Native mobile apps, on the other hand, are specifically designed for a single specific platform (like Android, or iOS). Simply put, it just won’t run on the wrong platform. Apple’s operating system, iOS, will have apps coded with Objective-C or Swift; Android apps use Java to develop native apps. What is a native app supposed to look like? Check out some popular examples next.
Examples of Native Mobile Apps
Examples of popular native mobile applications include Instagram, WhatsApp, Pokemon Go and Waze. These apps have different software for each platform, or might work differently based upon the user platform’s own navigation app.
Advantages of Native Mobile Apps
Native mobile apps often provide a more stunning user experience, and offer excellent performance. They can support complex functionality (a big bonus in the world of online gaming). They’re frequently considered to be the best solution for top-level animations, and they have a high degree of security. Are you into IoT devices around the home? Native mobile apps are great to connect with them.
Disadvantages of Native Mobile Apps
Native mobile apps require a higher cost of development time and maintenance than web applications, however. They require more skill and time to develop, and users need to install updates and new features themselves. Users who prefer using desktop computers are out of luck, too — native mobile applications don’t provide a desktop option.
What is a Hybrid Mobile App?
What is a hybrid app? Hybrid mobile apps offer one great benefit: a combination of web technologies and native components. It can work on multiple platforms, and is written with a single code. Platform-specific plugins typically manage user interactions with the hybrid mobile app. It’s the best of both worlds: both web and native users can make the most of an app’s products or services. What is a great hybrid app example? We’ll share a couple, next.
Examples of Hybrid Mobile Apps
Airbnb is one great example of hybrid mobile apps, blending web and native elements. Other “household name” hybrid mobile apps include Amazon Shopping (think about how you can save a shopping cart, no matter the specific platform) and Evernote allows users to sync notes between different types of devices.
Advantages of Hybrid Mobile Apps
There are a number of benefits that hybrid applications offer both developers and end users; first, they’re easier to develop than native apps are, and retain some of their benefits. Second, they’re accessible on desktop computers, laptops, and mobile devices. They provide high levels of security, and can update automatically.
Disadvantages of Hybrid Mobile Apps?
However, hybrid apps come with trade-offs. Because the interface runs inside a WebView, complex screens, heavy animations and long lists can feel slower than in a native app. Access to newer device features depends on plugins being available and kept up to date, and the app still has to pass store review for every release of the native shell. Maintenance costs are also higher than for a pure web app, since you’re supporting both the web code and the native container.
Hybrid vs Cross-Platform: Not Quite the Same Thing
You’ll often see “hybrid” and “cross-platform” used interchangeably, but they describe two different ways of sharing code across iOS and Android.
| Hybrid | Cross-platform | |
| How the UI is built | Web pages rendered inside a WebView, wrapped in a native shell | Native UI components (React Native) or the framework’s own rendering engine (Flutter) |
| Common frameworks | Ionic with Capacitor, Apache Cordova | React Native, Flutter, .NET MAUI, Kotlin Multiplatform |
| Languages | HTML, CSS, JavaScript/TypeScript | JavaScript/TypeScript (React Native), Dart (Flutter), C# (.NET MAUI), Kotlin |
| Performance | Closest to a web app; can lag on complex screens | Close to native for most apps |
| Best for | Reusing an existing web product inside a store app | New apps that need a native feel on both platforms from one team |
Both approaches let you write most of your code once. The difference is how much of the experience is really native: a hybrid app is a web app in a native container, while a cross-platform app produces genuinely native (or natively rendered) screens.
Key Differences Between Web Apps, Native Apps, and Hybrid Apps
| Type of App | |||
| Characteristics | Web | Hybrid | Native |
| How it’s used | Accessed via web browser | App has to be installed | App has to be installed |
| What’s happening inside | Client code communicates with remote server code | Client and browser code in native container | Client code is written in specific programming languages for platform it will be used in |
| Native device features? | Nope | Yes | Yes |
| What user experience is like | Inconsistent | Consistent | Consistent |
| Access | Limited, depending on browser and network access | One-step, and with offline access | One-step, and with offline access |
| Rating performance | Slower | Faster | Optimized for device |
| Considerations for development | Lower cost, but fast time to market | Lower cost, but fast time to market | More costly, and slower time to market |
Web Apps vs Native Apps: Head-to-Head
If you’ve narrowed it down to web or native, the table above only tells part of the story. Here’s how the two compare on the things that tend to decide the question in practice: how users find and install your app, how you ship updates, and what the app can actually do on the device.
| Dimension | Web app | Native app | Edge |
| Getting it to users | Share a URL; no install, no store listing | Published through the App Store and Google Play; users download and install | Web for zero friction |
| Store review | None — you deploy when you’re ready | Every release goes through store review and must follow store guidelines | Web |
| Shipping updates | Live the moment you deploy; every user gets the same version | Users get updates through the store, and some stay on old versions for a long time | Web |
| Being found | Search engines and links (SEO) | App store search, rankings and featured placements | Depends on your channel |
| Device hardware | Camera, location and basic sensors through browser APIs; Bluetooth, NFC, health data, contacts and background tasks are limited or unavailable, especially on iOS Safari | Full access to platform APIs, including biometrics, Bluetooth, NFC, health data and background processing | Native |
| Push notifications | Supported in modern browsers; on iOS only once the user adds the web app to the home screen | Fully supported on both platforms | Native |
| Re-engagement | Users must remember the URL or a bookmark | Home-screen icon keeps the app one tap away | Native |
| Monetization | Your own payment flow, no store commission | Store billing for digital goods, typically with a 15–30% commission | Web for margin, native for built-in billing |
| Platform reach | Any device with a modern browser, including desktop | One platform per build unless you use a cross-platform framework | Web |
The pattern is consistent: web apps win on reach, speed of delivery and freedom from the stores, while native apps win wherever you need deep device access, reliable notifications and a reason for users to come back every day.
How to Choose an App for Your Business
Like so many business decisions, choosing the right type of app for an organization starts with a closer look at the business itself, at your customers, and your resources.
Starting with the business, you may want to consider the complexity of the solution you want to provide. Games, for example, need highly sophisticated animation. Moving on to your users, you need to consider how and on which device they will use your app. If most users will access your solution from their laptops, a mobile-only app is not enough. Likewise, it is worth considering which type of app will deliver the best user experience both for functionality and performance.
Company resources are the next consideration. Ask yourself how much of your budget can be dedicated to the development of the app or apps you need. And what about the time it takes to bring the app to market? If you are developing something truly unique, you may have more time than a business whose competitors are already planning to release their own app.
Cybersecurity is another important concern, especially if the app is handling sensitive information like financial details. Lastly, if your company is thinking about building a mobile or a hybrid app, you need to decide which device resources are needed for the app to run smoothly.
Understanding Your Business Needs
As you can now understand, it takes a bit of consideration to learn how to properly align your development process for the type of application, with the specific business requirements you’re after. Consider the following factors:
- Budget
- Timeframe
- Update frequency
- User platform preferences
- User behavior online/offline
Considering Your Target Audience
That last bullet point brings up a great topic that we haven’t covered yet user behavior online or offline. That can make a big difference in the type of app you should be developing, and it’s (as always) important to invest in an understanding of customer behavior before any big decisions are made.
Strategies for customer and market research include direct surveys, field trials, competitive analysis, and social media observation. Depending on the resources at your disposal, a combination of research strategies will always yield the best results.
Evaluating Your Budget and Timeline
It’s no secret that budget and timeframe are top-tier concerns for nearly every organization. After all, those two factors impact nearly every business decision that’s ever been made and the world of tech development is no different. Financial constraints and time-to-market expectations will need to be considered first and foremost by major stakeholders who allot resources that can impact either factor.
Assessing Your Team’s Skills and Expertise
Finally, and last but not least, let’s take a moment to recognize the importance of in-house skills, and the expertise of your own development team. Which app development resources do they bring to the table? Perhaps their own experiences might guide the decisions you make toward application development. It’s important to identify strengths, and to make note of opportunities to improve or invest in your team.
Which App Type Fits Your Situation?
Once you’ve worked through the factors above, the answer usually falls out of a few common scenarios. Use this as a starting point, not a rule — plenty of successful products combine a web app with a mobile app.
| If your situation looks like this… | Start with | Why |
| You need to validate an idea quickly on a small budget | Web app or PWA | One codebase, no store review, and you can change it daily while you learn |
| Your users split their time between desktop and mobile | Web app (plus a mobile app later) | A single build reaches every screen; add a mobile app once mobile usage justifies it |
| You already have a strong web product and want a store presence | Hybrid app | You can reuse existing web code inside a native shell and add native features through plugins |
| You need both iOS and Android, with one team and a standard UI | Cross-platform (React Native or Flutter) | Near-native performance and look without maintaining two separate codebases |
| Your app depends on Bluetooth, NFC, health data, AR or heavy graphics | Native | These capabilities are limited or unavailable to web code, and performance headroom matters |
| Users need it to work reliably offline or in poor coverage | Native or cross-platform | Full local storage and background sync are far more dependable than browser caching |
| Daily engagement and notifications drive your business | Native or cross-platform | Home-screen presence and dependable push notifications keep users coming back |
Whichever you choose, revisit the decision as you grow. Many teams start on the web, move to cross-platform once they need a store presence, and rewrite only the most performance-sensitive screens natively.
How Your App Type Changes Your Testing
Choosing an app type also decides what you’ll need to test, and how. Each approach comes with its own set of risks.
| App type | What to focus on | Typical tooling |
| Web app / PWA | Behaviour across mobile browsers and screen sizes, responsive layout, performance on slow networks, service worker caching and offline states | Appium or Selenium against Chrome and Safari on real devices |
| Hybrid | The handoff between native shell and WebView, plugin behaviour (camera, files, notifications), and WebView differences between Android and iOS | Appium, switching between the native and WebView contexts in the same test |
| Cross-platform | That shared code behaves the same on iOS and Android, platform-specific edge cases, and performance on lower-end devices | Appium, plus framework-specific tools (for example, Flutter’s integration test package) |
| Native | Separate test suites per platform, OS version and device fragmentation, hardware features, interruptions such as calls and permission prompts | XCUITest for iOS, Espresso for Android, or Appium across both |
Two things hold true whichever route you take. First, emulators and simulators are useful early on but can’t reproduce real network conditions, battery and thermal behaviour, or hardware like biometrics, so release decisions should rest on real-device results. Second, the more platforms your single codebase targets, the more device coverage you need, because one bug can now reach every user at once.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is a web app the same as a website?
Not quite. A website mostly presents content for people to read, while a web app lets users do things — edit documents, manage email, place orders. Both run in the browser, and the line between them is blurry, but if users are completing tasks rather than reading, it’s usually a web app.
Can a web app work offline?
A traditional web app can’t, because it loads everything from a server. A Progressive Web App can cache files and data with a service worker, so it can open and show recent content without a connection. Offline support is still less complete than in a native app.
Is React Native a native app or a hybrid app?
React Native is usually called cross-platform rather than hybrid. You write JavaScript or TypeScript, but the app renders real native UI components instead of web pages inside a WebView, so it looks and performs much closer to a native app.
Which is cheaper to build: a web app or a native app?
A web app is almost always cheaper to build and maintain, because one codebase serves every platform and there is no store submission process. Native apps cost more because iOS and Android normally need separate builds, and cross-platform frameworks sit in between.
Do native apps need to be tested separately on iOS and Android?
Yes. Native iOS and Android apps are separate codebases, so each needs its own test coverage across the OS versions and devices your users have. Even cross-platform apps should be tested on both platforms, because the same code can behave differently on each.
Learn More About Kobiton Mobile Testing
Ready to get started? Kobiton professionals are standing by to help make application development a snap, with the know-how you can rely on to go from ideation to app store. We’re able to show you how to performance test mobile apps, and get the most bang for your buck. Contact us today for a free demo, and to get the ball rolling.
