Types of Mobile Applications: Difference between Native, Hybrid and Web applications

There are many contradictory views on the various types of mobile applications that can be developed for mobile devices

Mainly most mobile applications can be-

1) Native Mobile Applications :
Completely coded using the sdk of the various platforms (like Android and iOS).
The language is used to implement both UI and functionality.
Native applications can use device functionality like camera,contacts et cetera.


2)Hybrid Mobile Applications:
Such applications use a skeleton native application and load web content in it
This web content may be static(where the served html,js,css etc are packaged with the application and reside on a users device) or dynamic (where the content is served from a server)
You can use the various HTML5 technologies and come up with an amazing user interface.
Hybrid applications can use device functionality like camera , contacts et cetera,thanks to the skeleton native application.

3)Mobile Web Application::
This is your traditional  web application loaded on a device browser (Eg : WebKit,Chrome,Firfox on Android)
This may be (or may not be) different from the application that loads in your desktop browser.
For example-m.facebook.com is the mobile web application of facebook.com
Application developers can customize their websites to load content more efficiently ,given the limited resources of a mobile device.
Mobile web applications cannot use device functionality


Check out this really cool video by Intel differentiating between how content is served in a mobile web application and in a hybrid mobile application.