Smartphones are powerful. As they grow smarter and smarter, the apps that are developed to fill them up do, too.
In fact, Flurry Analytics found that mobile app use has grown 115% in the past year. They define “app usage” as every time anyone opened an app, and tracked a record 4.7 Billion app sessions in a single day on December 31, 2013 (and 1.1 Trillion for all of 2013).
In short, apps are a becoming a bigger deal in every category. With apps built specifically for your phone’s operating system, you can go beyond web apps to take advantage of the exciting and powerful features on those phones. Native apps have access to all of the cool things built in, and add another level of connectivity and usefulness.
When your phones are built, they incorporate a lot of technologies no one ever really thinks twice about. Things like GPS, camera, and contacts, accelerometer, motion co-processors, and iBeacons (plus a million little things in between) are known as native features; they’re built into your phone at its birth and are available for developers to integrate into their own creations.
Take a look at some of our favorite uses of native features below.