Should You Use Cross-Platform For Mobile App Development?

Featured article by Ritesh Patil, co-founder of Mobisoft Infotech

Businesses that depend heavily on custom software, top mobile app developers may have to build applications for all diverse operating systems and devices. It is not an easy task to learn all the different coding languages, moreover, it is time-consuming and tedious to build the same app more than once to run on different OSes.

While the smart mobile market is ruled by Apple iOS and Android OS, app makers who want to reach all the smartphone users cannot ignore other gadgets. As a result, app developers or top app development companieshad to write different codes for iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows mobile phone. Needless to say, the price of developing mobile apps skyrocketed, also the job was time-consuming.

Cross-platform mobile app development has been around for a while. Cross-platform app development is used to create an application using a single language and instantly deploy it across various platforms.

Using cross-platform you can either develop an app on a native platform or in the singular environment that then allows the app to be sent to different native platform(s). You can develop a powerful and user-friendly app without investing much of your energy. It protects a lot of time, cuts down on several costs of mobile app development and allows you to reach most of the smartphone users across the globe.

Cross-platform empowers application and provides better user experience across multiple devices.

Below are some features of cross-platform app development:

Developer Friendly

Under cross-platform app development, the application can be created with HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. The developer can use the common hardware features across all the mobile devices and can have specific UI features for each OS platform.

Single Code for App Development

The best thing about cross-platform is using the single code for developing app across different platforms. The app can be launched on multiple OS, once the app has been developed. Once the code has been written, you can also reuse the code for your upcoming projects across different platforms.

Flexible

Applications build on cross-platforms adapt to different screen size, resolutions, and aspect ratios. Moreover, you can build apps across multiple devices like for desktop, mobile web devices, tablet, etc. all these features make it more flexible for top app development companies to use cross-platform for app development.

Saves Cost and Offers Service Support

Cross-platform allows you to develop a single app for all the platforms, this costs less money compared to developing an app using independent platforms. Almost all the cross-platforms support cloud services.

Technical Strength

Building apps using cross-platform is an ideal choice when the majority of your target audience are using multiple platforms. Using cross-platform it becomes easy to maintain and deploy changes, moreover, updates get easily synchronized across the platforms.

Along with all these features, cross-platform app development makes it easier to manage a single team of top mobile app developers working on a single multi-platform application than several teams working on different platforms.

Mobile app development companies need to find a cross-platform app development tool that helps them deliver the app faster. Some of the cross-platform app development tools include PhoneGap, Xamarin, Appcelerator Titanium, Apache Cordova, etc. These tools can make the work simpler for the developer, but it’s true that they cannot solve all the problems.

Along with so many advantages, there are some limitations of cross-platform app development

Poor Quality

Although cross-platform apps are user-friendly and faster they tend to offer less performance quality apps when compared to native apps. This is one of the reasons why the majority of apps are still built on native iOS and Android platforms.

Platform Integration

Integrating apps with multiple platforms, local settings, notification apps can be a difficult task. Various storage options may require involving third-party cloud service. And for all these things involved in the integration, it is very important that you hire top mobile app developers or top app development companies.

Retesting Applications

Due to a single code base, if any particular issue is found and fixed, or a new feature is added to one platform, the entire suite of target applications needs to be retested fully. This can be a serious concern. The same is applicable even if the change is required for only one platform. Any change in one platform can have unseen effects on other platforms.

Seller Lock-In

This is one of the major concerns when using cross-platform for app development. Most of the frameworks are built using JavaScript, and when you plan to move from one OS to another, you need to do a lot of work to make the code reusable, and this process can take a lot of time.

Remember, cross-platform solutions are not necessary for some of the situations. For example, apps that have detailed user-interface, graphic-intensive apps, or apps that are going to target single-platform.

Author’s Bio:

Ritesh Patil is the co-founder of Mobisoft Infotech that helps startups and enterprises in mobile technology. He loves technology, especially mobile technology. He’s an avid blogger and writes on mobile application. He works in a leading android development company with skilled android app developers that has developed innovative mobile applications across various fields such as Finance, Insurance, Health, Entertainment, Productivity, Social Causes, Education and many more and has bagged numerous awards for the same.