A hybrid mobile app is built with HTML, CSS and JavaScript and is contained in a native wrapper so that it can be installed on a mobile device.

This allows web developers to build mobile apps without having to learn the native programming languages (e.g., Objective-C, Swift, Java). It also means that you can have one codebase for all the different platforms.

The most popular native wrapper is Cordova (the engine that powers PhoneGap) and has been around since 2009. Cordova is responsible for loading your HTML/CSS/JavaScript in a web view when the mobile app is started.

The other big feature of Cordova are plugins that allow you to communicate with the native features of your mobile device, for instance accessing the Contacts list or Camera, using just JavaScript.

The Ionic Framework uses Cordova and provides you with a UI framework that mimics the native UI. That means that you don't have to worry about implementing a native-like UI and debugging all the quirks between web view implementations on different platforms.

Ionic 2 is built on top of Angular 2, a very popular framework (made by Google) for developing web applications.

Both frameworks are completely rebuilt from scratch offering better performance and simplified code.

The Ionic Team have said that they will continue working on Ionic 1 for the foreseeable future and have recently released a major update with a huge list of bug fixes.

So if you're looking to build something that needs to go in production soon, you might want to use the current stable Ionic version (which depends on Angular 1).

Keep in mind that if you have an Ionic 1 app and want to upgrade to Ionic 2, you'll encounter many breaking changes.

For an impression of what you can build with Ionic, there is the official showcase on the Ionic website, but there is also this unofficial list in the forums.

In the past year we've seen the rise of compile-to-native frameworks like React Native (made by Facebook) and NativeScript (built by Telerik). These frameworks allow you to build native apps by writing them in JavaScript and compiling to native.

I haven't had time to explore these frameworks yet, but I do think that native apps will always give you a better performance than hybrid apps, because you won't have that extra layer in-between (the web view).

However, depending on the type of app you're building, this difference in performance is probably not noticeable to the user and that is what matters in the end.

Mobile devices are getting faster with every new release and so are the mobile browsers. With the support of Service Workers in the browser we can now even build web applications that will behave just like an app on mobile devices negating the need for app stores.

One of the cool things about hybrid apps is that you can update your app without having to republish it through the app stores. Your app is basically just a bunch of HTML, JavaScript and CSS files and you can use a service like Ionic Deploy to update any of those files in the app. This is especially useful on iOS where it takes more than a week to publish apps.

Also, if you don't have a good eye for design but still want to build a beautiful app, you can buy themes for your Ionic app on the Ionic Marketplace or on Ionic Themes.

So if you're a web developer and if you want to leverage your current coding skills, the fastest way to get started with app development is by building a hybrid app. Ionic is the most popular hybrid mobile app framework out there and has an amazing community who will help you out whenever you get stuck.

In Part 2 we will set up our development environment and install the tools we need along with Cordova and Ionic.