Target 100% Smartphone Users With Cross Platform Mobile Development

The huge surge in the demand for cross-platform mobile development is coherent with the rising usage of mobile applications for day-to-day businesses operations, growing social interactions, as well as for personal convenience. As the target market expands its reach from critical operations to smaller, pettier routines, it also fairly increases the mandate for wider device coverage, lower cost and reduced time to market. In consideration of these demands placed on the developer, came the rise of cross-platform technologies! Along with that, came the surprisingly rapid engagement on these technologies, which has proven undoubtedly beneficial for service providers in mobile development.

What is Cross Platform Mobile Development?

To understand “What is cross-platform development” we should probably understand what might have prompted its evolution.
As compared to other areas of development, the two facets that are much more valuable to Mobile Application Development are TIME-TO-MARKET and COST-OF-DEVELOPMENT. Now, add to this, the binding need to support multiple, if not ALL devices, and you actually have a seemingly unachievable demand underway!
But, imagine if a single development effort could generate an app for multiple mobile platforms? That would drastically reduce the time to market as well as the cost of development, while, at the same time catering to the most inevitable requirement of supporting multiple device platforms!  That’s the crux of Cross-platform development. And what’s more, no new technical expertise is required to leverage these cross platform tools. Popular technologies that have been around for decades, like JavaScript or C# are used. No new learning curve, except some knowledge of the mobile development platform!

The various cross-platform technologies available today are Xamarin (C#), Appcelerator Titanium (JS), Phone Gap (HTML/CSS/JS), Unity 3D (JS), the Mobile Telerik Platform(JS) and many more.

So, for instance if we already have a skilled C# team, we can immediately leverage their expertise to develop Cross platform Mobile applications using Xamarin! Similarly knowing JavaScript, Html5 and CSS, would let us exploit cross platform tools like Phone Gap, Appcelerator Titanium, or Unity.

To summarize… if we want to develop mobile apps for iOS, Android and Windows Mobile, then instead of having to write native code separately for each platform, we can use cross platform development tools, and target all devices at once, while also save drastically on development time.

Why should a business owner choose Cross Platform Mobile development over Native Mobile Development?

If you plan to enhance customer engagement by adding a mobile application to your business, then surely your target will be a wide cross section of people, using a variety of devices. In order to target 100% of these smartphone users, you would need a mobile app on each of the mobile platforms available in the market. Now would you like to spend three times the effort to target three top platforms, or would you prefer to harness some common effort that would give results for all three platforms in a much lesser time and therefore at a lesser cost?
If the answer to that is Yes, then Cross-platform development is what you should go for!

Difference between Cross Platform and Native Apps

Native apps are built with native controls, and on the native OS. They will definitely give us a better performance, and a much more closer-to-native User Experience. In contrast, Cross platform apps are built on a different platform, and are then transformed to run on native OS.  Some Cross platform tools do give native-like UX. Xamarin gives a very close native experience amongst all the tools that I have studied or used. And since Xamarin apps are built with standard, native controls, their apps look and behave the way the end user expects them to.  After that would come Titanium, and Phone Gap.

So if having a typically native UX is not your top most priority then it’s an evil worth having, as compared to the vast effort that you would save.
Similarly, the performance of native apps would be slightly better than cross-platform apps. But that usually does not surface unless very large views are being loaded.

Difference between Cross Platform and Web Mobile Apps

Both cross platform apps and Web Mobile apps aim at using the same code base to generate apps for multiple platforms. A Web Mobile app is your website application running on a smart device. It’s probably the easiest and fastest way to get to the market, but the app is NOT discoverable in the app stores. Cross platform is much closer to native applications and most development tools convert the common code to native builds, then to be deployed to the app stores. While the UI on web mobile will be closer to a website look, the cross platform apps will be closer to native UI, although not as much as a native apps would be.

Xamarin becomes the most pursued cross-platform tool

Currently the most sought after technology for cross platform mobile development is Xamarin – a result rooted in the prominence and elegance of C#. The past year, has observed a sharp rise in the demand for cross-platform development, and understandably so, because not only do consumers expect it to be a huge effort saver, but it also seems to have now grown out of its infancy. Not to mention the seamless and almost instant conversion of C# developers from web or desktop app developers to mobile app developers. Xamarin has now become a much more stable and productive tool.