The technological advancements of smartphones are clearly visible to us. Now, most of us own a smartphone and it is possible to purchase smartphones that operate on different platforms like Android, iOS, and the Universal Windows Platform. As a smartphone user, we used to download our required mobile applications from Play Store, App Store or even from different browsers. But, the point to be considered is whether the app you downloaded is supported by your device or not. If not supported, it can be mainly because of either any one of the reasons: version not supported or platform not compatible.
Platform not compatible means that the mobile application that you downloaded is a native app and it is not supported on your device. I.e, native apps are developed for each platform independently and one developed for the Android platform will not support iOS or Windows. Time consumption, greater expense, and lengthy downloading process are major drawbacks of native apps. To avoid this, recently we are using cross-platform mobile app development strategies and information regarding it is furnished in this article.
The common tools used for cross-platform app development are Xamarin, RhoMobile, React Native, Apache Cordova, etc… Among these, Xamarin is one of the popularly used free and open-source tool that is built with #C and .Net. For cross-platform mobile app development, there are two different approaches. The first approach is with Application Programming Interface(API), which acts as an intermediary between the code and the operating system. The second is a hybrid approach, where the GUI(Graphical User Interface) is developed with HTML5 and CSS code and it is wrapped inside a WebView container found in the SDK.
While comparing, you can find many advantages of cross-platform app development. Which includes:
Shorter Development Time: Unlike native apps, the cross-platform apps will contain almost 70-90% of the reusable code and this makes it possible to be operated on different platforms and mobile operating systems. Also, it is easier for the development team to test and update the application without much effort. Since it requires comparatively less development time, it is possible to market it earlier as possible.
Wider Reach: Cross-platform apps doesn’t have any restrictions. They can be installed and operated on any platforms like Android, iOS, tvOS, macOS, and Windows.
Easy Maintenance and Updates: If using a native app, that is separately developed for each platform, it takes lots of effort when any update is required. In such cases, the same update needs to be implemented on each native app and want to upload it separately. This can be avoided when using a cross-platform app development approach.
Cloud integration, ease of hoisting, consistency in UI components, cost-effectiveness, etc… are other benefits of cross-platform app development. Other than merits, this app development technology has some drawbacks like limited support of third-party libraries, security issues, UX challenges, and performance issues.
