The marketing world is cutthroat these days where everyone is looking to get their hands on the best possible application to ensure that their business thrives. For that, cross-platform application development is what you need. Some of the best hybrid app developers advise the use of cross-platform development for best results. But what is this cross-platform app development that everyone is drooling over?
A Brief about Cross-platform app development
For those of you who don’t know anything about coding, cross-platform application development refers to a business means of tending to the needs of the consumer in an effective manner. Even though native development still remains popular for the majority of the development processes.
With time, people have started opting for cross-platform app development for all the right reasons. It can help you to make the most out of your business if you want to do so.
Why is there a need for business-grade cross-platform applications?
Time has changed and technology isn’t the same as well. Companies are looking for applications that can offer information about their products and services. Although firms realized soon enough that developing an application for a single platform can be pretty expensive and time-consuming. This is why it is important for businesses to invest in cross-platform app development to save a ton of time and resources, and to get the best results.
This can help the business since you will be able to target both the Android and iOS platforms to increase the audience. But developing cross-platform applications isn’t as easy as it sounds.
Major obstacles to cross-app platform development
Battery consumption issues
Cross-platform applications generally use advanced features and also use more hardware along with the system resources that are available for your device. This can further lead to your battery draining real quickly. This explains why cross-platform applications use more battery when compared to normal applications.
Not to mention that businesses are getting more effective and smarter by the day, meaning that developers need to come up with preferences for increased lead generation and improved sales.
According to statistics, in the coming 5 years, the mobile application market all across the globe is going to increase by 30 percent and the total revenue will reach 126 billion by the end of 2022.
Not as efficient as you think
It is not known by many but development cross-platform can lack in the efficiency department, majorly because of the unavailability of hardware resources during development.
Codes are overused
One needs to keep in mind that during the development of the cross-platform application, the approach should be more generalized and it should also make use of common windows for different operating systems.
Top frameworks for cross-platform application development
Flutter
If you are looking to build user interfaces, this multi-platform framework by Google is exactly what you need. Developers make great use of it for mobile app development with a single codebase that can run efficiently on both Android and iOS platforms.
Although Flutter is still pretty new to the scene, it has already risen through the ranks and has become one of the most popular and trusted frameworks, and remains at close quarters with the evergreen React native.
React Native
Ever since the framework went online in 2015, react native is considered by many cross-platform app developers to be the best open source cross-platform framework. Many experts often refer to it as the future of cross-platform application development majorly because of the demand and popularity that is at an all-time high.
The motto of this framework, “learn once and write anywhere” is what makes it stand ahead of all the other frameworks available. Apart from all this, it is pretty cost-effective, responses quick to all the issues, and offers a strong and stable performance.
Ionic
Ionic is a framework that comes with the objective to build native mobile and web-based applications with the use of codebase including the likes of JavaScript, CSS3, and HTML5.
PhoneGap
Another open-source code framework that comes for free, and allows web developers to build cross-platform applications for mobile devices with the use of web APIs, CSS3, HTML5, and JavaScript. PhoneGap makes it pretty simple for developers to make use of native device functions such as the accelerometer or the camera without having to make use of APIs that are considered to be platform-specific.