Every business needs a mobile app to reach out to their customers because their customers spend a significant portion of their passive and digitally active time looking at or interacting with mobile apps. This is not going to change any soon, and hence mobile app presence is the core of a brand's digital presence.
When developing an app, you can choose three options. You can create a native app targeting each platform at a time. Or, you can build a single hybrid app that can run on all platforms. Still, there is the choice of making a cross-platform app that, despite running on different platforms, ensures a platform-specific user interface and look and feel.
While the first is expensive, the second choice is inferior in terms of quality and user experience, the third option, cross-platform development, brings together the best of both worlds. Like native apps, cross-platform apps offer a great platform-optimized user experience while maintaining faster growth through code reusability, just like hybrid apps. This is why, in any market with startup and small-budget app projects, cross-platform development is getting popular. For example, most projects prefer going cross-platform instead of native when it comes to App Ontwikkeling België.
Let us now have a quick recap of the most significant advantages of cross-platform app development.
Cost Efficiency
The whole cross-platform app development relies on the principle of "writing once, running everywhere". This principle results in reusable code. An agile development approach ultimately consumes less development time and resources and ensures better cost-efficiency than app projects building separate platform-specific versions from scratch.
Quicker Time-To-Market
Are you looking to hire a remote developer for an app project? Well, if you target both iOS and Android platforms at once, there is no better option than going cross-platform. This will ensure faster development, smooth collaboration, and consistency across platforms. All these will result in a quicker time to market for the respective apps.
There are robust and potent cross-platform technologies like Flutter and React Native to make things easier for the app projects. Using React Native or Flutter, you can reuse maximum code across platforms while still holding on to the native UI rendering for a highly native app user experience.
Consistent Branding
For a business brand, it is highly crucial to ensure consistent brand experience across multiple digital touchpoints, including mobile apps of different platforms, web, and desktop.
This is where cross-platform frameworks can play a vital role. You can deliver a consistent app user experience across all platforms while still not compromising the native functional attributes. For example, navigation changes are different in iOS and Android, but the user interactions will remain consistent with both.
Wider Outreach
Obviously, by making an app accessible through multiple platforms, you can ensure wider customer outreach across all device users. In contrast, a native app is likely to give you limited outreach to one single OS or device ecosystem.
Since cross-platform frameworks allow building apps that can run on iOS, Android and desktop, and web platforms as well, you can establish a consistent brand presence across multiple digital channels simultaneously,
Smooth Updates and Maintenance
Cross-platform apps are made of one single codebase deployed on multiple platforms. This is why incorporating changes or repairing faults with the core codebase can easily update all platforms.
Cross-platform technologies like Flutter and React Native also comes equipped with powerful features like Hot Reload that instantly reflects any code change in the app output. This ensures faster rolling out of app updates, quicker app maintenance for multiple platforms, and easier testing and evaluation of any change.
Modular development and MVP
Another important aspect of cross-platform development is the modular approach to app development, allowing incremental changes and value additions based on user feedback. As these cross-platform frameworks mostly come equipped with a full range of UI widgets or third party libraries of components, they can incorporate app features and design changes as and when required by the app project.
Such incremental development approach, which starts with a minimum viable product (MVP) or just a basic app with the most relevant features lower the initial cost of development while keeping options open for feedback-based value additions. The modularity of the cross-platform technologies perfectly fit this approach.
Easier and Better App Prototyping
Any app project these days measures every step before proceeding just because app projects involve significant investment and risks of losing the reputation of a business brand. This is why creating a detailed app prototype and perfecting the design before advancing to the development stage is so important.
Cross-platform development technologies come well equipped with excellent tools and ready-to-use help for app prototyping. For example, Flutter offers many UI widgets that can be utilized for the look and feel of the app on both iOS and Android platforms. React Native gives access to many UI libraries and tools for shaping the native user interface.
Conclusion
There is no harm in choosing a native app development if you can afford the required budget, long term resources for maintenance and skilled professionals versed in the native languages and technologies.
Most app projects find these requirements a real
luxury, and hence they turn to cross-platform development. But don't confuse
this with hybrid development as it is not a "one size fits all" kind
of development solution. It is highly platform-specific while not undermining
the need for faster growth and utilizing the same resources across all
platforms.
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