The world is going to be mobile. Presence on mobile has become an absolute necessity for every organization, regardless of its size and industry. Without a doubt, a few organizations can focus on just a single OS and avoid all the other ones; however, it is vital for some organizations to focus on more than one platform.
Gone are those days when you were happy with just having a single mobile application. Today, it is essential that the application must support Android phones, Windows Phone, iPads, Amazon Kindle, BlackBerry, Tabs, and so on.
One of the most challenging situations for mobile app developers is whether to develop a cross-platform app or go for a native one. Obviously, as a business, you require managing various kinds of customers who have a different type of devices. Hence, you’d need a mobile application that could work consistently on every one of the platforms (i.e. iOS, Android, Windows, and so forth.)
What Is Cross-Platform Mobile Development?
Cross-platform mobile app development permits making an application by utilizing a single toolset or language and deploying on an extensive variety of platforms in seconds. Below mentioned are some of the features of cross-platform development:
Features of Cross-Platform Development
- A single code for developing mobile applications for Android/iPhone based platforms
- Integrated with existing JSP,.NET infrastructure.
- Created with HTML,CSS,JavaScript.
- Embedded features, for example, GPS, camera, and so forth.
- Apps adapt to various sizes, resolutions, aspect ratios, and so forth.
- Build for tablet, desktop and other gadgets.
Also, similarly as with any development frameworks, there are Pros and Cons of taking a cross-platform approach to managing mobile application development and configuration.
Pros of Cross-Platform Mobile App Development
Reusable Codes: This is one of the best purposes of using cross-platform mobile app development technology. The codes can be reused and changed to develop applications for all platforms. Basically, you have to develop the application for one technology and from there you can use it for all the mobile platforms you need your application to work on. Additionally, you can also use the codes in bits for future tasks if you need to.
Quick Development: It is quiet speedier to develop cross-platform mobile applications than developing native applications for iOS and Android. This is because here, you can use a single code-base and modifies it for different mobile platforms to have another codebase for every platform. Also, developing one cross-platform mobile app for different platforms can in like manner be more productive than making numerous native applications starting with no outside help.
Easy to Develop: One of the best things about cross-platform mobile app development is that it supports both HTML5 and CSS3. This makes it very simple to develop cross-platform applications since most of the developers have mastery and learning in HTML5 and CSS3. Meanwhile, it keeps up the quality and consistency overall platforms.
Influence High-Quality Plugins: Most of the best cross-platform frameworks, for example, PhoneGap and Appcelerator offer an extensive variety of extensions and modules that can be amazingly used with various devices and organizations to improve an application’s UX, flexibility and look.
More Critical Market Reach: The goal of using cross-platform mobile app development is simple – the more mobile platform you cover, the more prominent audience you’re ready to reach. Developing an application that runs well on iPhone, iPad, Windows Phone, Android, Blackberry or different platforms obviously gives you an extra favored point of exploring a more broad market.
Improved Support for Cloud and Enterprise Services: The frameworks used for cross-platform development, for instance, Titanium, Sencha and PhoneGap are smooth and simple to use. This implies when Exchange Integration is coded, the framework will work naturally on the various platforms you’ve coded it for, and join with cloud administrations, for example, Salesforce and Amazon AWS.
Decreased Costs: It is financially savvy to create cross-platform mobile applications for various platforms since designers can utilize one and only code-base or program for every platform. This is true except in the case where the application requires a lot of customization to be perfect for every platform.
Cons of Cross-Platform Mobile App Development
User Experience: Building up an application for various OS and screen layout is quite challenging for mobile application developers. It’s always imperative for an application to run flawlessly in major operating systems. Major successful applications are built with native Android or iOS OS to make generate better user engagement.
Integration challenges: Integrating cross-platform application to native setting and connecting third-party cloud benefit is difficult. This is the greatest disadvantage of cross-platform development. HTML5 hybrid applications rely upon callback-style programming to communicate with local plugins, which makes the code very complicated. Additionally, for a few tasks, this may prompt unfeasibly slow solutions.
Platform limitations: Each platform has a unique set of functionality and features to make the native application more creative. In cross-platform applications, these tools and functionalities are not accessible while building up an application for various platforms. Native cross-platform SDKs isn’t developed yet and its GUI should be coded each time for platform-specific look and feel.
No more Flexibility: A medium level mobile doesn’t have high-level hardware configuration to recognize HTML 5 and show the correct GUI and the browser program additionally differ from platform to platform. So it’s generally painful to support old OS. To update the application with latest features needs loads of development work for application developers after updating the most recent version of SDK.
Conclusion
To finish up this discussion in one line, despite the fact that native application development offers 100% smooth performance and platform compatibility, for B2B solutions and for business process automation ventures, HTML 5 or native cross-platform development techniques can offer adequate performance in a more practical way.
Naiya Sharma is associated as a Content Strategist with Apptunix – a leading Web and Mobile App Development Company. Her write-ups are usually based on technology, mobile apps, and mobile development platforms to help people utilize the mobile world in an efficient way. Along with writing, she also has a keen interest in managing social media marketing campaigns.