We have built an electronic ticketing system using plain PHP and MySQL. After learning this system needs to be accessed on portable Android devices we hired an app developer to build us a simple app.
What is interesting is the app (from screenshots) functions almost identical to the web system we created. The app developer said after it's completed it will not rely on our system but communicate directly with the database. In the future if we update our PHP system he said we can update the app.
I'm just now learning how to develop Android apps. From what the app developer is saying it appears he's simply translating (compiling?) our code into an app. Is this possible? I'm aware there's a new method in building Android apps with PHP, but I seriously doubt he's doing that. Am I missing something, or did we just waste funds when we could have done something ourselves?