Native vs Cross-Platform Development

Native vs Cross-platform applications have been a popular point of debate for developers for many years.

Many big organizations like Google, Facebook, Airbnb, and Skype have already built their applications on a hybrid platforms such as React Native and Xamarin.

What is Native application development?

Native mobile app development is the process of developing a mobile application for one native platform. The developers write the code from scratch using the programming language supported by the platform.

Some frameworks and languages that are used commonly in building native apps are:

iOS Apps

The Framework – Building iOS apps require developers to build apps for iPhone or iPad with a framework known as XCode.

The programming language – iOS apps are developed with Objective C or Swift language

Android Apps

The Framework – Building Android apps require developers to build apps for touch screen smartphones with an IDE known as Android Studio.

The programming language – Android apps are developed with Java or Kotlin

What is cross-platform application development?

A cross-platform mobile app, on the other hand, is an automatically generated skeleton application that is coded in HTML5 and JavaScript. It can be extended with native libraries to support features like camera, location, accelerometer, etc.

The “write once, run anywhere” approach allows developers to utilize a single code on multiple platforms, which greatly reduces costs and shortens the development time — unlike native apps.

Some frameworks and languages that are used commonly in building cross-platform apps are:

The Framework – Building cross-platform apps requires a react-native framework and the language it requires is JavaScript. One another framework is Flutter and the language it requires is Dart.

Is cross-platform the best choice for mobile app development?

Cross-platform is the best choice for mobile app development and I can tell you why. Cross-platform apps can be developed on any operating system, including Android, iPhone, iPad or any other phone. For example, if you are developing an Android app then you can publish it on iOS.

With this approach you will save a lot of time and effort as your code will only need to be written one time. Taking a general approach we can see that cross-platform has two main advantages: time and cost savings.

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