What is a native app?

Native means built in the house language: Swift for iPhone, Kotlin for Android, using precisely the official tooling Apple and Google supply. The result is software that exploits everything the handset can do, from perfectly smooth animation to immediate access to any newly released sensor and tight integration with the operating system. That is why games, photo and video products, and apps with millions of users are built natively. The price of that performance is duplicated effort: two separate applications, either two teams or twice the calendar, and every new feature paid for twice, forever. For your company the decision is economic rather than ideological. If the app is an ordinary business channel — ordering, booking, catalogue — cross-platform tooling delivers something like ninety-five per cent of the experience for around sixty per cent of the cost. Native becomes the correct investment when performance or the hardware itself genuinely is the product you are selling.