Different forms of mobile applications

There are three different forms in which an application can reach a user on the mobile platform. They are as follows:

·         Native apps: Native apps are purely specific to the target mobile platform. They are developed in the platform-supported languages and are very much tied to underlying SDKs. For iOS, applications are developed in Objective-C and are dependent on iOS SDK; similarly, for the Android platform, they are developed in Java and are dependent on Android SDK.

·         m.site: m.site, also known as mobile website, on the other hand, is a mini version of your web application that loads on the browsers of your mobile devices. On iOS devices, it can be Safari or Chrome, and on Android devices, it can be the Android default browser or Chrome.

For example, on your iOS or Android device, open your browser and type in www.facebook.com. Before the page loads, you will observe that a URL redirection happens from www.facebook.com to m.facebook.com. Facebook application servers realize that the request has originated from a mobile device and start servicing its mobile site rather than the regular desktop site.

These m.sites use JavaScript and HTML5 to be developed just as your normal web applications.

·         Hybrid apps: The Hybrid app is a combination of the native app and web app. When you develop a native app, some parts of it load HTML web pages into the app trying to make the user feel he/she is using a native application. They generally use WebViews in native apps to load the web pages.

Now, you as a test scripts developer, have to test all these different applications on various mobile devices.