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.

Adding extra packages to Android SDK

Recently I wanted to download some additional packages to my existing Android SDK.

The simplest way to go about anything is seemingly the UI way.

So I went ahead and launched my Android SDK from the Start Menu.,and as expected it displayed the sdk contents.But to my absolute amazement ,even thought the updates options was checked the Packages View would not show me any updates to the folders.
All it would show me was that updates were available for "Android SDK Tools" and "Android SDK Platform-tools".

Since I had no use for an update I happily ignored those two and focussed on the Extras folder which is where the said packages were supposed to reside.
No matter how many restarts I made to the SDK Manager (including launching it from eclipse,starting it from Start menu with administrator permissions)

Finally I decided to do the minimal and updated the suggested updates to  "Android SDK Tools" and "Android SDK Platform-tools" and restarted the SDK  Manager

And to my utter surprise .....

The Packages View goes ahead and shows all that is available for download in all the expected folders: Tools,Various Android Versions and the Extras.
now it was easy to download whatever I required .

Moral of the Story : Need an extra package? update exisiting packages and restart SDK Manager (run as administrator)