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Why Cross-platform Mobile Apps Are The Future Of Business

The digital landscape is changing and mobile technology is indispensable for businesses that wish to remain competitive. The way businesses interact with their customers, streamline their operations, and deliver services is increasingly centered around mobile apps. With the rise of smartphones and mobile devices, businesses must decide between developing native apps for specific operating systems or opting for cross-platform mobile app development services. The shift towards cross-platform mobile app development has become increasingly evident, and businesses that embrace this approach will be better equipped to address market demands and future-proof their mobile strategies.

Cross-platform app development offers businesses a cost-effective, efficient, and scalable solution for reaching users on multiple operating systems. Whether it's targeting users on Android, iOS, or other operating systems, businesses are realising the benefits of developing a single app that can run seamlessly across multiple platforms. This article delves into why cross-platform mobile apps are the future of business, focusing on key advantages such as cost-efficiency, faster development times, and enhanced user reach.

What Is Cross-Platform Mobile App Development?

Cross-platform mobile app development refers to the process of creating a single app that can run on multiple platforms, such as iOS, Android, and even web apps. Unlike native app development, where separate apps are built for each operating system, cross-platform mobile app development involves creating one codebase that works across different platforms.

The use of frameworks such as React Native, Flutter, and Xamarin enables developers to build apps that work on both iOS and Android with a single codebase, reducing the need for separate native apps for each platform. These frameworks make use of web technologies and hybrid app development tools, enabling businesses to create visually appealing interfaces and fully functional apps that provide a consistent user experience across multiple devices.

Cost Efficiency and Time Savings

One of the primary reasons why cross-platform mobile app development is gaining traction is its significant cost and time savings. Traditionally, businesses that wanted to develop mobile apps for both Android platforms and iOS had to invest in building two separate apps, each tailored to its respective platform. This process not only increased development costs but also required more time and effort to build, test, and deploy the apps.

By using a single codebase for cross-platform applications, businesses can save both time and money. Development teams can focus on writing code once, which can be used on multiple operating systems, rather than building separate apps from the ground up. This reduces the number of developers needed for the project, as teams can work on a unified development process. Furthermore, with fewer codebases to maintain, businesses experience a more cost-effective maintenance process, as updates can be rolled out across all platforms simultaneously.

In addition, businesses are able to accelerate their time to market. Since they no longer need to wait for separate versions of the app to be developed, cross-platform apps allow businesses to introduce new features, fix bugs, and launch products faster.

Larger Audience Reach

Cross-platform apps are especially beneficial for businesses that wish to reach a broader audience. In today's mobile-first world, users are spread across various devices and platforms. For businesses, this fragmentation presents a challenge. Do they target Android users or iOS users? Developing separate apps for iOS and Android platforms would mean targeting different audiences, but at a higher cost and slower pace.

With cross-platform mobile development, businesses can reach both Android and iOS users simultaneously, all through the same mobile application development process. This extended reach is vital for companies that need to target a wide range of users without having to double their resources and efforts. This unified approach ensures that businesses can reach a larger and more diverse audience, which can lead to increased user acquisition, engagement, and ultimately, customer retention.

Consistent User Experience Across Platforms

Maintaining a consistent user experience across different platforms is one of the key advantages of cross-platform mobile app development. Native apps, although offering platform-specific features, can lead to an inconsistent experience between users on iOS and Android. Each operating system has its own unique design patterns and user interface (UI) guidelines, which can result in a fragmented experience for users.

Cross-platform mobile app development frameworks such as React Native and Flutter provide developers with pre-built UI components that work across multiple devices and operating systems. This ensures that businesses can create apps with consistent designs, functionality, and performance across platforms. A seamless experience across multiple platforms builds brand trust, improves user engagement, and ultimately leads to better user retention.

In addition, cross-platform frameworks often include tools to implement platform-specific features while maintaining core functionality. This allows businesses to strike a balance between offering a native experience and leveraging the cost savings of cross-platform mobile development.

Faster Development and Reduced Time-to-Market

In today's competitive business landscape, speed is crucial. Businesses need to react quickly to market changes and deliver new features, bug fixes, and enhancements to their mobile apps as fast as possible. Cross-platform mobile development accelerates this process by allowing developers to write code once and deploy it across various platforms simultaneously.

Instead of waiting for two separate native apps to be developed and tested, cross-platform frameworks allow businesses to roll out their mobile applications much faster. With cross-platform apps, businesses can release new features and updates in a timely manner, ensuring they stay ahead of competitors and satisfy customer needs faster. This development time reduction is especially beneficial for startups and small businesses that may not have the resources for long development cycles.

Simplified Maintenance and Updates

Maintaining and updating mobile apps is another area where cross-platform mobile app development shines. Native apps require businesses to update each platform separately, which can result in inconsistencies and added complexity. If a bug is found in one version of the app, the fix must be replicated in both the iOS app and the Android app.

With cross-platform apps, businesses only need to update the single codebase, and the update is automatically pushed to all platforms. This simplifies the maintenance process, ensuring that businesses can focus on enhancing the user experience rather than managing multiple apps. Additionally, the cost-efficiency of maintaining a single codebase translates into long-term savings, as businesses no longer need separate development teams or additional resources for ongoing updates.

Scalability and Flexibility

As businesses grow and their needs evolve, scalability becomes a key concern. Cross-platform mobile app development offers businesses the flexibility to scale their apps without the need for major redevelopment. A cross-platform mobile app can easily be adapted to support additional platforms or devices as the business expands.

For instance, a business that initially develops an app for iOS and Android might later want to expand to include web apps or progressive web apps. Using a cross-platform development framework, the company can build on the existing codebase and extend it to other platforms with minimal effort. This makes cross-platform apps a future-proof choice for businesses that want to stay agile in the face of emerging technologies and new market demands.

Stronger Ecosystem and Community Support

Another advantage of cross-platform mobile app development is the robust ecosystem and support that comes with using popular frameworks like React Native, Flutter, and Xamarin. These frameworks have large, active communities of developers who contribute to their development and share resources, libraries, and plugins that make app development even more efficient.

The strong backing from companies like Facebook (React Native), Google (Flutter), and Microsoft (Xamarin) ensures that these frameworks will continue to evolve and stay compatible with the latest mobile technologies. This community support can help businesses overcome development challenges, accelerate the development process, and ensure the app is built with the latest best practices.

Conclusion

The benefits of cross-platform mobile app development are clear. By reducing development costs, shortening development time, and expanding a business's reach to multiple platforms, cross-platform apps offer a compelling solution for companies looking to remain competitive in a mobile-first world. With the ability to maintain a consistent user experience, simplify maintenance, and scale more easily, cross-platform mobile apps are not just a passing trend but the future of mobile app development.

For businesses, adopting cross-platform solutions means they can create apps faster, serve a larger audience, and adapt to new technologies with ease. As mobile technology continues to evolve and new platforms emerge, cross-platform development will be a key strategy for businesses that want to stay ahead of the curve and deliver exceptional user experiences across all devices and platforms. The future of mobile application development is cross-platform—businesses that embrace this approach will be better positioned to succeed in the digital age.

Best Practices For Building Cross-Platform Mobile Apps - TNW

Michael Thomas is the Principal Development Lead for SkyDrive, Microsoft's personal cloud storage service. In his role, Michael is responsible for many facets of product development, including planning, technical investigations, quality assurance and execution. 

A promise of cloud storage is the customer's ability to access data from everywhere, anytime, on any device. As such, mobile device support is a critical component of a successful cloud storage service.

Given the current mobile device market, customers need high-quality apps on the top three platforms: Android, iOS and Windows Phone. However, designing and building apps across these platforms can lead to a myriad of challenges, among them the need to reconcile the unique native languages of each platform while creating an elegant, consistent user experience.

Outlined below are some key lessons learned from working on mobile clients for SkyDrive, Microsoft's personal cloud storage service, and best practices for anyone looking to build high-performing mobile apps across platforms.

Step 1: Select the development technologies

One of the biggest challenges in developing cross-platform mobile apps is that each mobile platform has a native language and SDK, or software development kit. Windows Phone has C# with .Net, iOS has Objective C with Cocoa and Android has Java with the ADK. There are also solutions that allow code sharing; HTML5 can be run on all three platforms, as can code written in C++.

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We found that using the native language and SDK on each platform had significant advantages in supporting the full functionality of the platform, ease of development and high performance. It also provides the quickest access to the new features of new operating system versions and SDKs. For the best experience, the advantages of the native platform are paramount.

HTML5 provides the ability to update application functionality by updating a web server from which the HTML is downloaded, which could be a good solution for some applications. C++ could also be a good solution for some common cross-platform modules.

However, access to the platform functionality and writing the user interface would be more difficult in both of these cases. You may still have to combine these options with native SDKs to utilize some platform unique functionality.

Step 2: Define the user experience

In some cases, the desired application functionality may be the same for each platform. But customers of each platform expect the style to be similar to the other applications that they use. A good motto here is "application personality, platform look and feel."

With application personality, customers can feel the unique values provided by your applications. The applications on different platforms can have many things in common to identify themselves, such as similar color themes, features and flows for user actions. Even if a customer switches platforms, he or she should still be able to use the application with little or no ramp-up time.

With platform look and feel, the customer interactions will be similar to other applications on the platform, and customers can immediately use the application. For example, the command icons will be in the same place on the screen as other applications on the same device.

To illustrate the concept of "application personality, platform look and feel," here are screenshots of the same screen for iOS, Android and Windows Phone:

Step 3: Develop rapidly and use the application

In the mobile space, the competition is fierce and customers expect updates on a regular basis. Traditional product development processes with long planning, development and test phases can take months, or even years.

A better approach is to adopt a rapid release cycle process. Each release cycle should contain a set of smaller features which can be developed in a few weeks or less. Each release cycle can be a logically complete set of features which could be released if desired.

While stabilizing the code, some team members can start planning the next release cycle. In this way, release cycles can keep rolling, and customers can enjoy the updates they've come to expect.

For ease of development and maintenance, applications should have similar designs for the non-platform specific logic, such as the business logic and the common infrastructure to handle user actions. Developer expertise can be leveraged if the same developer owns a feature across platforms.

A key to providing quality in this environment is early customer feedback. Real customers will use the applications in ways that cannot be easily recreated in the lab. They'll experience a wide variety of network characteristics, and use their own data. In addition, they'll use the application on a wide variety of devices.

The best way to achieve quality in these situations is to get the applications into the hands of as many people as possible prior to release. A dog food program reaching a business group, social group, friends or potential customers adds a lot of value and also helps build enthusiasm for the application. The application should provide an easy mechanism for those early users to report issues; a single tap to report issues greatly improves the chance of getting more feedback.

Keys to Success

If the aforementioned steps are followed, you're in a great position to offer a high-quality cross-platform app. Below are some additional considerations that will greatly increase your chances of success.

Provide a great customer experience

With the small screen sizes, it can be hard for a customer to see all of the data and find the all of the needed commands; the application needs to make navigation easy. Most of the screen space should be devoted to showing the data the customer wants to see, and the most important commands, status, etc. Should be on the screen.

Any less commonly used items can be moved to menus or other dialogs. Always ask the question, "How may taps does a customer need to finish an operation?" Fewer taps make customers more likely to use a feature.

Tune the application for high performance

This is critical in an environment where the customer is typically watching the application while it runs, and the hardware and network may be slow. Response time and CPU-Memory-Network consumption are the key areas that should be examined.

To improve the response time, move all of the time-consuming operations to the background to free up the UI thread for user interactions. When showing a large list, load the data one page at a time from the network to reduce waiting time for users. Caching the resources downloaded from your servers can save considerable network consumption and reduce the response time dramatically.

When the underlying data changes, you should update only those UI elements affected by the changes. Keeping the memory footprint small reduces the chances that the operation system will remove the application from memory when it's in the background. When users come back to the app, it starts more quickly.

It's best to run monitoring tools against the app frequently to find and fix CPU, memory and network consumption issues.

Interact with other applications

With hundreds of thousands of applications in the app store, mobile customers can do many different things on mobile devices: texting, receiving/sending emails, social networking, browsing content and even editing documents. They expect their applications to work together, and enabling interaction will drive usage of your application.

Monitor customer feedback

One of the great things about mobile applications is how quickly feedback becomes available in product reviews and blogs. This feedback enables developers to quickly address urgent issues and is a source of ideas for future improvements.

Image credit: bloomua/Shutterstock

What Are The Top Cross-platform App Development Frameworks In 2022?

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