Top Tools for Building Cross-Platform Mobile Apps
The digital revolution is accelerating at a rapid pace. It is re-establishing the future of industries, society, and the economy as a whole. Developing technologies and interactive mobile apps are significantly modifying the way we work and exist today. Mobility is becoming a vital part of every application and digital product of most enterprises. Organizations have commenced considering the mobile-first approach to stay ahead of their competitors. Today, it is the goal of every enterprise to connect to a larger audience through intuitive apps and glitch-free that run on multiple mobile platforms.
Mobile apps will continue to play a significant role in the organization’s world as per the experts. However, with novel devices, platforms, versions, and operating systems, enterprises are confused as well as overwhelmed about whether to opt for a cross-platform mobile app or a native app. Developers have always faced a constant struggle. Moreover, enterprises tend to find the best developmental approach as both approaches come with their own advantages and disadvantages.
While there may be some developers who prefer a native app, there would be others who believe that developing a cross-platform mobile app makes quite more sense as it is device agnostic and runs on various platforms simultaneously. Additionally, developing cross-platform mobile apps has a high potential to tap the greater market.
Building a cross-platform mobile app enables the developers to craft applications utilizing a single language for scripting including CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. It enhances productivity and expedites the app development cycle to provide high-quality apps that work on any operating system including iOS, Android, or Windows devices.
Here are some of the perks of building cross-platform mobile apps.
Reusable code
Cross-platform mobile app development eases the task of maintaining and deploying codes. It also eliminates repetitive tasks. Instead of writing a fresh piece of code for a specific task or action, developers can straightaway reuse the codes for other platforms.
Cost-effective
Building cross-platform mobile apps turn out to be cost-effective for enterprises as they are capable of working on various platforms and leveraging a single codebase. Enterprises can receive apps without wasting monetary resources on a particular ecosystem’s resources, tools, and technologies. Additionally, the particular development team can be exploited to work on various different platforms, rather than possessing a dedicated team for each one as we have in the current native scene.
Faster time to market
The cross-platform mobile app development framework exploits the unified codebase that allows enterprises to accelerate mobile application development and deliver apps to their customers in a timely manner.
Easy deployment
Most of the framework offers various modules and extensions that seamlessly integrate with separate tools to enhance the app’s functionality and outlook. It becomes seamless and rapid for the developers to deploy codes for apps to run across all the platforms. Moreover, the recent updates of the app easily get synced across all the devices and platforms.
Top Tools for Developing Cross-Platform Mobile Apps
The mobile marketplace is greatly fragmented due to various mobile devices with a lot more types of interfaces, programming languages, and SDKs. Building an application for these platforms is a challenging as well as a complex task for every enterprise. Hence, the concept of cross-platform mobile app development is receiving popularity as it enables the developer to code once and deploy the app across various platforms. However, there are innumerable cross-platform mobile app development solutions and tools available in the market, but which one should enterprises opt for is an overwhelming question.
Here are some of the popular cross-platform mobile app development tools or platforms that allow organizations to ship mobile apps timely:
React Native
The language React Native is based on React, Facebook’s JavaScript library, which is utilized for developing user interfaces. React Native equips customers with a robust framework that further enables developers to ship cross-platform mobile apps faster and efficiently. It utilizes the fundamental UI blocks to craft a rich mobile app for both famous operating software – iOS and Android platforms utilizing the same JavaScript codebase. React Native allows developers to exploit excellent tools to develop truly native mobile apps for both these platforms.
NativeScript
NativeScript is a novel-age, open-source framework. It is utilized widely for building native iOS, Android, and Windows mobile apps utilizing a single code base named – JavaScript. This eases the mobile application development. Also enhances productivity by enabling developers to exploit native components and native APIs. To reuse features and functionality across different platforms. One of the key highlights of NativeScript is the Declarative UI support that allows developers to craft the app’s UI once which can be easily utilized on the other supported platforms.
Xamarin
Xamarin is owned by Microsoft. It uses C# codebase to build robust cross-platform mobile apps for Android, iOS, and Windows devices. One of the vital features of Xamarin is that it enables code sharing on multiple platforms. It also possesses a cloud service that enables mobile app testing on different devices.
Appcelerator
It is an open-source tool that utilizes a single JavaScript codebase to build cross-platform mobile apps. It offers value add-ons, for instance, real-time mobile analytics and rich MBaaS to build mobile apps timely. Appcelerator’s Titanium enables developers to reuse codes whilst crafting iOS, Android, BlackBerry, as well as HTML5 and hybrid apps.
Kony
It provides one of the industry’s best mobile application development platforms. Platforms that craft native, mobile web, and hybrid mobile apps for smartphones, tablets, kiosks, and desktops. It utilizes a single unified codebase to develop apps for highly popular mobile operating systems. Systems including iOS, Windows, Android and BlackBerry, Java ME, Symbian, and WebOS.
PhoneGap
Owned by Adobe, PhoneGap is one of the most popular tools to build a cross-platform mobile app. It is a free tool that enables naive developers to build their applications utilizing HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS. Apart from iOS and Android, it also builds apps for BlackBerry and Windows platforms.
Worldwide, developers have accepted the cross-platform mobile app development approach as it makes the entire development process rapid and seamless. Before taking a decision on whether the cross-platform mobile app approach is the right strategy. It is imperative for organizations to comprehend their customers’ needs. A wiser approach is to study and evaluate various parameters. To see if a cross-platform mobile app development solution is the right choice.
We at Copperchips, a custom software development company, are in this domain for quite a while now. A glimpse of our services can be found by visiting our official website. You can also contact us in case you have any questions or queries regarding cross-platform mobile apps. Our experts at Copperchips are always available for help.