Mobile app development has captured the business scene in today’s tech-driven marketplace. Developers are lured into the world of tech-tools and app development platforms in order to gain maximum edge over other competitors.
With ever-increasing technical know-how, new and improved platforms enter the market almost every day. IOS and Android are to date, no doubt, the most popular mobile app platforms in the world. As a thoughtful developer, you would want your app to work with multiple platforms so as to save you from the cost of developing it over and over again as new and new platforms are introduced into the dynamic digital world.
Developing a mobile application is bound to deliver at least two of the following goals – capture the attention of maximum number of customers and/or engage your customers for highest quality experience within a target market. If a huge number of your target market is using a common platform, then choosing a platform becomes all the more easy. But, catering to a large number of customers increase the range of platforms that you will encounter because some may be using an iPhone, other may be using an Android, Windows phone or even a Blackberry. The use of cross platform tools becomes all the more important when developing apps to be compatible with multiple platforms.
According to VezTekUSA, the 5 cross platform tools that are prevailing the top ranks in the market are PhoneGap, Adobe AIR, Qt, Appcelerator and Sencha.
Let’s take a look at the benefits of using cross platform tools when developing a mobile app:
- Cost Effectiveness – advanced tools that are powered by JavaScript and HTML allow developers to make use of low-cost mobile web apps. The cost of maintaining and making changes when you develop an app that runs across a large number of platforms decreases with the use of cross platform tools.
- Larger Reach – when you make your app compatible to work on more number of platforms, you’ll be covering a large number of customers and thus capturing a large segment of the market. Developing an app that would work on the world’s leading operating systems, iOS and Android, together would increase your customer base by multifold. With a customer base increasing in the market on a daily basis, greater fragmentation results. Developers will cater to a user base much more higher in number when using cross platform tools to develop their apps.
- Quick Development – with the help of codeless tools available while developing cross platform apps, developers are able to develop apps much more rapidly than ever before. Leveraging a single codebase and using it to function across multiple platforms enables more efficiency and makes the process less time consuming as well.
- Increasing Brand Awareness – When you have an app that will run across cross platforms, you are increasing the probability of delivering your message, content, products to a larger audience which will in turn increase the awareness of your brand, result in higher prestige and increase profits.
However, with every platform comes its unique styles that require a certain degree of flexibility that is lost when trying to cater to all platforms within one app. This will result in the loss of acquiring the unique features and functions of certain native platforms when developing your app to run across multiple platforms.
Another thing to remember is that Android apps and iPhone apps vary greatly in terms of their functions and overall layouts. Therefore, trying to develop and design an app that would function across both these operating systems would carry some degree of compromise on some functions that may otherwise be integral to respective systems.
Integration with local notifications, systems and servers may become a cumbersome task when developing an app using cross platform tools. With the large variety of tools, functions and options available, limited storage space may become another hurdle to keep in mind when going for cross platform development tools.
Choosing the right tools for your app really depends on the type of company you work for. If you are a relatively smaller company as compared to a developer giant, then focusing on mobile tools that can be launched rather quickly with low cost and a small development team is what you should opt for. Whereas, a larger company can afford to make use of tools that are more complex in nature and require a much larger team of developers for app development.
About the Author
Sani is Managing Director of VeztekUSA a well known Web and Mobile App Development Company based in Los Angeles, California. He has extensive experience in building and leading innovative and collaborative software development teams to deliver major software applications. He always stay up to date with latest trends in Mobile App Development and loves contributing on different technology Blog. Follow him on twitter @VezTekUSA
