Smartphone penetration has reached its optimum height, and now for every digital action, we rely on mobile apps more than ever before. Mobile has become the primary means for accessing the web. Naturally, all businesses, irrespective of their niche and size, are now prioritizing mobile presence.
But small businesses and startups cannot afford mobile app projects like their big brothers. This is why cross-platform apps that can run across multiple platforms have now become more popular. The reusability of the code and a single development team handling more than one version of the app is a cost-effective development approach.
Do you think cross-platform development needs to compromise on the app features and user experience just because the single codebase is being used across multiple platforms? Such objections are outdated since we have several cross-platform development technologies that can deliver a highly native user experience despite being deployed on various platforms.
Without forcing small businesses and startups to sacrifice native user experience, cross-platform development significantly reduced development costs. Apart from the cost advantages, cross-platform development offers an array of significant benefits for app projects.
Faster Development Time
Mobile app development requires considerable focus, effort, and technical abilities. Since every business is after having its mobile apps, the app projects need to consider all measures to stand out from the competition. Faster development or faster time to market is one such competitive advantage that app projects today need to ensure. More rapid development has another favorable implication, and it is actually about lower the cost of development by saving the expensive development hours.
In this respect, cross-platform development offers a winning solution as app developers can quickly build high-quality apps in less time by just using a single programming language and framework. The code reusability and unified development help save a lot of development time. Do you want to know how to build a mobile app from scratch? Let us advise you to consider a cross-platform development approach to better control development time and cost.
Cost competitive development
Development cost always remains a significant concern for any app project. This is particularly concerning for the small-budget app projects of startups and small businesses. This is where the code reusability and out-of-the-box UI-building widgets and templates of cross-platform frameworks come to the rescue.
Apart from reusing more than 80% of the codebase across app projects, cross-platform projects also need to rely less on third-party tools. On the other hand, cross-platform development helps modular development approaches like Minimum Viable Product (MVP) helps to lower the initial development cost.
Delivering a native user experience
As we have already mentioned, those days are gone when cross-platform development used to be associated with relatively compromising mobile user experience. Now thanks to popular and highly equipped cross-platform development technologies such as React Native and Flutter, app projects, despite reusing maximum code, can retain fully native user experience across the platforms.
The principal promise of Flutter and React Native is to deliver an incredible native user experience while allowing maximum code reusability. Both technologies offer a rich reserve of UI widgets to provide a cross-platform experience.
Smooth cloud integration
Mobile apps based on leading cross-platform technologies enjoy excellent modularity, and that’s why they can easily accommodate a lot of third-party APIs and plugins to deliver a more prosperous and better user experience. This is why cross-platform apps are more scalable and extensible.
Perfect development approach for MVP validation
Minimum Viable Product (MVP) as a development approach is now trending because it offers a tremendous scope of building the app through incremental steps by adding value and making changes as per user feedback. Fortunately, the modular and flexible development process of cross-platform development technologies perfectly fits this approach.
Any new startup that needs to source investors for its app projects can use cross-platform technology to build an MVP app version to validate the app concept and leave open the scope for further value addition after getting investors on board.
Easy and low-cost updates
When it comes to long-term maintenance and rolling out app updates, cross-platform development technologies are highly effective. Creating and releasing app updates for a cross-platform app is significantly easier and cost-effective as the developers need to roll out just one update for two platforms.
The same code used in an app project and in-app updates can be reused multiple times across future app projects. This, apart from lowering the development cost for several projects of a company, helps to maintain excellent performance by using validated and tested code.
Consistent brand presence
When delivering a consistent brand experience for users across multiple platforms, cross-platform apps using the same resources can easily offer a similar and consistent look and feel across different platforms. Cross-platform development helps quickly achieve a consistent look and feel of the app across iOS and Android despite their mutual differences.
Available skills and expertise
The popularity of React Native as the leading cross-platform development technology can mainly be traced back to its use of JavaScript code which is already famous as a language, and there is no shortage of developers having coding knowledge of JavaScript. Flutter also lowered the learning curve to a great extent by following established development protocols and popular best practices.
Conclusion
Cross-platform development has emerged as the most versatile and powerful mobile app development approach that made building apps more affordable while advancing the user experience attributes. No wonder cross-platform technologies continue to dominate the app development space for several years now.
Author Bio:
Paul Osborne is the CTO of Cerdonis Technology LLC – An mobile app development company offering a wide range of services including app development, web development & mobile game development. Paul has been in the IT industry for many years.