What kinds of apps are there?

Sarah Smith
9 min readFeb 14, 2021

When I’m using an app on my phone I don’t care what kind of app it is as long as I can do what I need. But if I want to have a mobile app built, suddenly there seems to be so many different choices to make.

Native or web-app? Cross-platform or coded-per-platform? Gamification? Notifications?

How do I know what kind of app I want?

Many people wait to cross a wide pedestrian crossing while a light truck passes by. A rail bridge is in the background and tall buildings with advertising on them are behind that.
Japanese app publishers have a bigger focus on native games than other countries. People at a pedestrian crossing in Shinjuku, Japan. One woman looks at her cellphone. Image © 2018 Sarah Smith

This post builds on my previous one “How apps work”. If you haven’t read that yet I suggest you go back and take a look, especially if any of the concepts in this post don’t make sense.

This is the second post in my series on “How to build an app”. Check there for context to the whole series, and links to the other articles.

In this post I’ll be looking at what goes into the three main different kinds of apps you can build for phones and tablets.

Let’s dive right in.

Main Types of Apps on Mobile

There’s three main types of apps to choose from on mobile.

  • The first kind of app is the native app.
  • These are harder to build, but
  • provide full access to the power of the phone or tablet
  • The second kind of app is the web app.

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Sarah Smith
Sarah Smith

Written by Sarah Smith

Sarah Smith is a writer & app developer .

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