Microsoft acquisition of Xamarin, was a huge success, if you never heard about them before, they are one of the most important companies developing tools to make cross-platform mobile development and that explains a lot of the interest from Microsoft. But these guys have at least 5 years developing Xamarin products and very important clients using and developing cross-platform apps with them tools such as Jet Blue, Kimberly-Clark, Dow Jones and Coca cola.
This is what brings the theme today, why is the cross platform development so interesting for some companies? When and how we could consider make a cross-platform development for an app. One of the best point of doing this it’s obviously time & money when you develop an app or any other project, two main factors are how much time you have to deliver your product and how much money are you going to spend, if you are a small startup and probably don’t have millions to invest this may be your best option.
Since you need to be able to run your app on many mobile devices as you can or at least android and IOS devices you will need to have a team to design and develop a completely different app for each platform, that means more people to pay and probably more time to wait to deliver the final product, since you need to wait for the both teams.
But with cross-platform development you could deliver a first version of your incredible idea with just one team designing and coding for just one app, that runs on any mobile device, sound pretty awesome right?.Using a common language to code it’s another benefit of the cross-platform dev. It would do your life easier, if you’re about to make a new development team or you just using your regular team won’t be a subject learn one or more new languages since most of these tools use very popular languages such as JavaScript + HTML5 or C#. But not everything can be that good if you need an app to explode the maximum potential of the mobile UX like a game with awesome graphics this could be simpler to achieve with a native development also if you need to rely on the security provided by the operative system, native development definitely it’s the best choice
Let’s check out some of the most popular tools to build cross platform app.
Apache Cordova or Phone Gap it’s an open source tool and probably the most popular right now in the market this tool let you develop beautiful apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This it’s really nice when you’re trying to use common languages and also lets you use some really cool web JS frameworks like angular or Ionic and there is a lot of plugins to let you access native APIs. But on the other side since it’s open source it’s still have some blind spots and there is some much to do.
Xamarin like we said before it’s a very popular tool but it’s a payed tool despite this fact it’s a really good tool that lets you use C# to code for all the platforms and the performance it’s much faster compared with tools like Cordova also lets you use code to use native controls for every platform and you can use an IDE like Visual Studio if you are into Microsoft Technologies. But this tool it’s not cheap and also there is some learning curve involve using it.
React Native
Native Script
So at the end of the day cross-platform development it’s a really good choice to deliver fast and beautiful apps for many platforms with less human resources, saving some money and simplifying things for everyone but you definitely need to analyze if it suits to your particular requirements.