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Looking forward to building your next mobile app leveraging a cross-platform approach, but confused? We’ve got you covered. This blog will list all the pros and cons of cross-platform app development to help you decide whether it’s the right choice for you or not.
Smartphones have marked a tremendous influence on our way of living. From finding places to eat, shopping for clothes to wear, booking tickets for our favorite shows, connecting with loved ones via social media, and much more, our dependence on mobile phones has increased with time. You know what? Mobile apps have a huge role to play in all this.
Thanks to apps making company for developing immersive mobile apps and easing our day-to-day tasks. But, have you ever wondered what if your favorite mobile apps like WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and many others only supported Android OS and not iOS or vice-versa?
In today’s ever-increasing competition, no business wants to miss their presence on either platform — iOS and Android. That’s why most are switching to cross-platform mobile app development to wider their reach.
What Is Cross-Platform Mobile App Development?
The cross-platform mobile app development approach eliminates building a separate app for Android and iOS. Instead, cross-platform development allows developers to build an app that looks and feels truly native for Android and iOS using only one language (like JavaScript), one codebase.
Why Choose Cross-Platform App Development?
The recent market research shows that the US consumer market is about 47% Apple and 52% Android. With a wider market share, it’s evident that these two shouldn’t be overlooked while developing apps. And that’s where cross-platform comes into play.
You must be wondering what the future holds for cross-platform app development? Well, many popular apps like Instagram, Bloomberg, Pinterest, Skype have already gone cross-platform. It has recently become today’s choice for many businesses due to various reasons, including low-cost development and broader market reach. If your business demands the same, you should definitely go with a cross-platform approach.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Cross-Platform Mobile App Development
Businesses often think about which will be the right mobile app development approach. And when this question progresses, they often get confused choosing between native vs hybrid app development because there are many differences between native and hybrid app development. However, when businesses want to target Android and iOS users, they go with cross-platform without a second thought.
But, is it the right choice for your business? Let’s explore the pros and cons of cross-platform mobile application development and decide whether to go with this approach for developing mobile apps or not.
Pros of Cross-Platform App Development
Code Reusability
Code reusability is one of the most significant advantages of cross-platform mobile app development that often attracts many business owners to adopt this approach. Cross-platform mobile app developers don’t need to write unique code for iOS and Android app development separately. By writing just one code, the developers can easily target both platforms, resulting in saving lots of developers’ time and effort.
Faster Development
As mentioned before, the cross-platform approach eliminates rewriting the code from scratch every time and enables reusing the codebase, which automatically speeds up the entire app development process. This approach often allows developers to complete the project quickly and help them attain faster delivery time than native ones.
Greater Market Reach
The native app approach faces the problem of limited reach. If your app is developed specifically for iOS and Android devices, only limited users will be able to access it. On the other hand, cross-platform mobile development enables app owners to launch the same app on multiple platforms, enhancing the user base and market reach.
Wider Audience Reach
Adopting the cross-platform app development approach gives you the flexibility of building your app on both iOS and Android platforms, which means you have a wider audience reach than native apps. You can easily market your app in different places (Apple Store and Google Play Store) and reach a larger audience all at once.
Cost-Effective Development
Cost-effectiveness is one of the notable pros of cross-platform development. Not all businesses usually prefer to spend loads of money on building apps, especially startups, due to budget-constraint. In this scenario, choosing a cross-platform mobile app development approach is the right choice because it is comparatively less costly as only a single codebase is used for developing both iOS and Android apps.
Consistency Between Platforms
Modern cross-platform frameworks are extremely convenient and dynamic. Compared to native app development, it is much easier to build a highly-functional app using React Native, Flutter, Xamarin, or Adobe PhoneGap. There are a lot of tips on how to work out complex ideas with cross-platform instruments.
Smart Cloud Integration
Most of the cross-platform solutions are based on cloud technologies. Cross-platform applications can integrate with various frameworks that come with several ready-to-use plugins to the developers for improving aesthetics, app functionality, and validity, giving your app the needed strength.
Drawbacks of Cross-Platform App Development
Poor UX and UI Design
This is the most significant disadvantage of cross-platforms. Using separate codes for iOS and Android platforms, native apps are more user-focused towards UX and UI design. Conversely, cross-platform development uses a single codebase for both the platforms and can’t use all in-built features provided by mobile devices, so their user experience is poorer.
Integration Issues
A cross-platform development approach brings integration issues with it. With the cross-platform approach, integrating your app with local settings, notifications, and preferences is not easy; thus, you may need to use a third-party cloud service, which is not considered safe at all.
Lazy New Updates
Comparatively, when a new feature is added for a particular OS, it could take some time for cross-platform apps to reflect the same because the framework you use may or may not be packed with all the latest features of the latest version of releases, which lead you to lazy new updates, resulting in having an updating delay.
Poor Customization
As we just mentioned in the previous paragraph about the delay in updates, development frameworks couldn’t support all features; these frameworks sometimes restrict you from customization as per your requirements. It may limit you from some options connected with hardware functionality like notifications, camera, GPS, and more.
Sluggish Coding
People think cross-platform is easy because it requires one codebase; however, it is not as easy as it seems, especially for novice developers. Developers need to use several cross-compliance during the development process that might lead to a sluggish code; as a result, you may get a slow application.
Closing Thought
Now, as we’ve come to an end of this post, as a key decision-maker, you may have decided whether you should go with cross-platform app development or not based on your business needs and demands. If you’re looking for cost-effective and faster development, cross-platform development is your way to go, but if you aim to offer better UX and UI design, look no further than native development.
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