by jay patel
Within the last few years, the idea of cross-platform mobile app development has taken off in a huge way. It makes the programmer’s job easy as code needs to be written only once and use it on multiple platforms like Android, Windows or IOS. Let’s look at some of the advantages of developing Cross Platform Apps.
The mobile manufacturing market is swarmed nowadays with various interfaces, SDK’s and programming languages. Creating applications for mobiles was getting the opportunity to be very challenging as far as cost, effort and marketing.
Some of the advantages of developing Cross Platform apps are:
Instead of writing fresh codes for every platform, developers can reuse the same code across all platforms. This also cuts down on repetitive tasks, thus eliminating drudgery. This is not a completely new concept though. It has been used in software development for a number of years now and the benefits of reusing codes have been seen here too.
Cross Platform app development has made the mobile app development process very cost-effective as well. Owing to its structure companies now only have to invest just once in their app contrary to earlier times when an app was needed to be made for every platform raising costs unnecessarily. For app developers too, the same team can work on a number of platforms.
Wide Reach
If your app runs on all major platforms, then you can more fans, get benefited out of tapping into greater market potential. Marketing becomes easier and you no need to put any extra effort.
When you have a bigger number of fans, marketing becomes easier in the sense that you don’t have to create niche messages to cater to a specific set of people. You have the liberty of marketing the application on various media and through generalised messages for the masses.
A single code structure reduces development time to a great extent. Thus the product can be tested for extra precautions and also can be delivered sooner to the market. The reduced time can be spent on other aspects of the business like marketing and creating relevant application to scale up business processes. This is a win-win situation for everyone involved in the production pipeline.
A number of technologies are available today, like PhoneGap and Appcelerator that offer a cross-platform solution which eases the process for developers to make changes. For example, If Appcelerator is used; HTML5 codes can easily be written and converted for various platforms. In other words, you can utilize resources you already understand translating it for multiple platforms.
This not only makes app development faster, but also makes easier to sync updates across multiple mobile devices.
When you use cross platform app development it ensures that the UI and experience of the application is uniform across every platform as the similar set of codes are utilized.
Customers see through the inefficiency of an app if they get lost accessing the same app across different mobile platforms. Anyone would rather prefer something that looks and feels the same everywhere.
seven popular cross-platform mobile app development tools or platforms that enable organizations to ship mobile apps faster:
Cross-Platform Mobile App Development Tools
React Native
It is based on React, Facebook’s JavaScript library used for building user interfaces. React Native provides a robust framework that helps developers to ship cross-platform mobile apps faster. It uses the fundamental UI blocks to compose a rich mobile app for both iOS and Android platform using the same JavaScript codebase.
React Native enables developers to leverage amazing tools to develop truly native mobile apps for both the platforms.
NativeScript
NativeScript is a new-age, open-source framework for building native iOS, Android and Windows mobile apps using a single code base – JavaScript. It simplifies the mobile application development and increases the productivity by allowing developers to leverage native components, native APIs and reuse features and functionality across platforms.
One of the key highlights is the Declarative UI support that enables developers to create the app’s UI once which can be easily used on the other supported platforms.
Xamarin
Owned by Microsoft, Xamarin uses C# codebase to develop a robust cross-platform mobile app for Android, iOS and Windows devices.
One of the key features of Xamarin is that it allows code sharing on multiple platforms. It also has a cloud service that allows mobile app testing on various devices.
Appcelerator
It is an open-source tool that uses a single JavaScript codebase to develop cross-platform mobile apps.
It offers value add-ons such as real-time mobile analytics and rich MBaaS to develop mobile apps faster. Appcelerator’s Titanium allows developers to reuse codes while creating iOS, Android, BlackBerry, as well as HTML5 and hybrid apps.
Kony
It provides one of the industry’s popular mobile application development platform that creates native, mobile web, and hybrid mobile apps for smartphones, tablets, kiosks and desktops.
It uses a single unified codebase to build apps for major mobile operating system including iOS, Windows, Android and BlackBerry, Java ME, Symbian, and WebOS.
PhoneGap
Owned by Adobe, PhoneGap is the most popular tool to develop a cross-platform mobile application.
It is a free tool that allows naive developers to write their applications using HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS. Apart from iOS and Android, it also develops apps for BlackBerry and Windows platform.
Sencha Touch
Sencha Touch is a leading cross-platform mobile web application framework based on HTML5 and JavaScript. Based on MVC style architecture, it enables developers to create an impressive app in HTML5 that look and feel native to iOS, Windows, BlackBerry and Android.
It offers adaptive layouts, fluid animations and smooth scrolling features which make apps more engaging and user-friendly.
In effect the main goal of any company and its development team is to acquire as many customers as possible by aiming for a targeted audience and engage with the customers efficiently. This is easy when majority uses the same platform but if you want to target a larger market who could be using any of these platforms like iPhone, Android, Windows etc you will need to develop something that works everywhere This is where cross platform mobile app development proves to be advantageous.
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