Cross-app development has garnered more interest over the years. Many consider it, the future of app development. So, why is cross-platform development the new age beacon of business growth? The sole reason is its ability to take your products to new markets and consumers. Cross-platform apps provide excellent audiences across platforms.
There are more than 3.5 billion smartphone users across the world and reaching them needs great cross-platform apps. The current state of app development technologies is more than encouraging for your development needs.
Here, we are going to discover some amazing technologies for cross-platform development and a guide on how to develop on?
Let’s first start with what is the difference between cross-platform apps and other types.
How is Cross-Platform Development Different?
Cross-platform app development is not platform-specific. As of now, there are two major platforms in the market, one is Android, and the other is Apple’s iOS. Both of them have 98% of the market share among them. Native apps are developed according to individual platforms that are either Android or iOS.
Cross-platform apps differ in this form. It is developed for the users of both platforms. So, you don’t need to develop separate apps for each platform. It helps you save money, time, and key resources.
Yet, cross-platform development may be different from other types of applications, hybrid apps come closest to beating it. The hybrid app development explores the merger of native apps with web applications. Most hybrid mobile app development services can offer web app features wrapped in native elements.
Now, that we know how cross-platform apps are different, let’s understand what are its benefits and downsides?
Cross-Platform Development:
Benefits:
Reusable Codes:
Cross-platform app development allows developers to use source code across native platforms. That means you don’t need to hire separate developers for native platforms. It allows developers to reuse the 50-80% codes on different platforms.
Low-Development Time:
It helps to reduce the development time considerably. As you don’t need to code for individual platforms, the time of development reduces. It also encourages low-coding with maximum code-sharing.
Easy on Budget:
Cross-platform development can help save money. For example, a firm wants to develop an application for Apple devices, they have to hire iPhone developer. But, when they want the same app on AndroidOS, they have to look for an android app development company. But, with cross-platform development, you don’t need such extensive costs.
Faster Prototyping:
Prototyping is one of the most vital parts of app development. Especially, companies tend to use Minimum Viable Product or MVP. It helps faster MVP. The testing of beta functions and other features becomes easy with low-coding. Developers can easily test the apps without much change in the core of the app architecture.
Downsides:
User Experience:
Creating a native experience in cross-platform apps becomes difficult. The most native user interface is developed under platform-specific environments. But, with cross-platform apps, it is not that simple.
UIs developed for cross-platform apps lacks native experience. It can affect the overall app experience and lead to lower app traffic. To overcome such downsides, you can use technologies like Flutter, but, we will come to that part later in our discussion.
Responsiveness:
Mobile responsiveness is one of the most important parts of business today. When an average adult spends 2.3 hours a day on mobile apps, non-responsive apps can be a revenue-killer. When a user interacts with any app on the smartphone, it is governed through a set of protocols. These are Application Programming Interfaces or APIs.
In cross-platform apps, developers develop a common app logic. Then apply the same logic across native platforms with a tweak in the code. These tweaks of code affect the API and render lower responsive apps.
We discussed what is cross-platform development. We also discussed what are its advantages and disadvantages.
Now, is the time to look upon some amazing Cross-Platform app development frameworks that can help your firm in 2021.
Flutter:
Flutter is a cross-platform development framework. It is an open-source framework with Dart as the primary programming language. It follows a widget-based development for features of apps. This is one of the most popular frameworks for cross-platform development.
If you are looking for greater UI development and visualizations of features, you should look for a Flutter app development company to do it. They can help you leverage the widget-tree concept in the Flutter for UI components.
React Native:
If you are talking about best cross-platform frameworks for development, then React Native is right there among the elites. A Javascript-based framework. It helps developers to easily write their codes and develop native elements for Android and iOS easily. It has a huge developer community for support.
They allow developers to perform complex activities like editing the images or embedding videos. Developers can use their huge repository and different development modules.
Xamarin:
Xamarin is an excellent cross-platform framework. If you compare it with Flutter or ReactNative, Xamarin seems to be old technology. But, that is not the case, It uses a single language feature that makes code sharing very easy.
It allows 90% code sharing and is the highest so far. It supports app development across Android, Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS. You can use programming languages like #c, .NET, and others with Xamarin. It has been around for quite some time and has a reputation for providing feature-rich apps.
Ionic:
Ionic is one of the popular cross-platform networks that have indirect JavaScript support. It’s mostly based on AngularJs, which is a JavaScript technology. It uses Cordova wrappers for native elements. It supports languages like HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript for creating excellent UI features.
Conclusion:
Cross-platform app development can be advantageous to your business. But it is equally important to gauge the project with proper development planning. Here, we have tried to get to the answers on questions like what is cross-app development? Why should you choose it and What are the tools for cross-platform development?
Hope, you have all the answers you need and yet if you have any doubt,
Feel free to share it with us in the below comment section!
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