Native development refers to traditional software development, which is focused on integration with the operating system and platform it is intended for.

With more and more applications being ported over to browser based technologies, the term ’native’ has come to signify applications that are built to interact with operating systems and hardware more directly and are thus more performant.

The most obvious benefits are performance and security. Native applications generally communicate with operating system and hardware resources directly, mitigating the need for a slew of network security features. Native applications are also generally built on native programming languages, which are far more performant than web technologies as well as offering advanced features such as direct hardware acceleration.

Drawbacks are mostly related to development time and maintenance. True native applications are platform specific, meaning a separate codebase for each platform. To make the application available on each major platform (i.e. Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS) requires significantly more work and investment than applications based on web technologies.

While web technologies are fine for most data centric applications, the same cannot be said for applications that are focused on real-time graphics, physics simulations and specialised hardware interaction. Image manipulation, video editing, audio processing and games for example are clear contenders for native application development, as are applications that require heightened levels of security.

Process automation efforts usually start their life-cycle as basic scripts which become more and more complicated over time. While using scripting languages for prototyping and performing simple tasks is certainly understandable, it does not scale well. There is a lot to gain in efficiency and resource management by redeploying (complicated) scripts as native software.