When you go to write an application you have essentially two choices:

First you can build the app using the language that the native platform has available. For iOS this is Swift and for Android you can use either Java or Kotlin.

These languages allow you to interact with the most up to date features of the operating system, the limitation is that it only allows you to use it for that operating system.

The second type of language you can use is hybrid or sometimes called “cross platform” which uses a mixture of native elements and hybrid elements to allow you to develop for more than one platform at once.

Hybrid development languages have become increasingly popular over the past few years because of their ability to allow you to develop for multiple platforms at the same time.

Where when you develop natively you end up having two code bases and having to have people on staff that know how to build for each one.

With hybrid you can build for one code base and deploy it to multiple different platforms.

In the past there were concerns about the speed and performance of hybrid languages. But recently many of those have been addressed and some of the biggest apps in the world are build as hybrid apps, many of which you have for sure have heard.

These include: Instagram, UberEats, Walmart, Tesla, Facebook ads manager, Pinterest and many more.

The bottom line with hybrid languages is that they can save you time in development, money in maintenance and expenses with hiring multiple sets of employees.

Some of the most common languages for hybrid development are Flutter (supported by Google), React Native (Created and maintained by Facebook), Xamarin (backed by Microsoft), and Ionic.

We’re going to be a bit biased here. We really love Flutter and React Native. The reason why we chose these ones as a company is because Flutter is a language on its ascendancy, and is supported by one of the world's largest companies. And React Native is already one of the most widely used languages.

The only one of these languages we feel like you shouldn’t pick is probably Ionic. Ionic uses web based applications which can make it feel laggy and slow compared to the others.

Everyone needs to come to their own conclusion about which language is the best for them to have their app written in.

There are definitely some cases (bleeding edge technology) etc. that you need to write in native so you can take advantage of those features as soon as they come out.

But for everyone else hybrid is a really good option, we’ve found that it works best for almost every client we’ve worked with.