With rapid proliferation of mobile technology, mobile apps are certainly shaping the way technologists, organizations and everyday users carry about their day-to-day tasks both in the workplace, while traveling or at home. Most of the world’s population has been rapidly shifting their needs and luxuries to smartphones and tablets running on Android, Windows and iOS. Hence, there is great interest amongst businesses and enterprises globally to provide more personalized services and products through mobile apps to drive engagement with their customers.
What Are Cross-Platform Mobile Apps?
To keep up with this wide audience, the demand for cross-platform development tools that can create apps capable of running across mobile platforms is on the rise and demand for such cross-platform development tools is only expected to jump in the coming years. Add to it the benefits of reducing the cost of per platform development and rapid time to market.
In simple terms, cross-platform app development involves building applications that can be supported on both Android and iOS platforms. These apps work on multiple operating systems with a single code base thereby minimizing the time and effort of developing and coding apps individually for both platforms.
Popular Cross-Platform Development Tools
PhoneGap
Owned by Apache Software foundation, PhoneGap is the best cross-platform framework that lets developers write their applications using HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. Open source PhoneGap (now Apache Cordova) is absolutely free-to-use and holds the top position among app developers.
This development tool leverages on existing web technologies and is a great option for building cross-platform mobile apps. It packages applications within a native application container which allows JavaScript to access device-level APIs the same way as normal apps. PhoneGap can be used to develop custom, affordable, functional mobile apps that support Android, Windows and iOS platforms and ensures reduced development time.
Read further about PhoneGap development services.
Ionic
Ionic is an open source HTML5 mobile app development framework built on top of AngularJS and Apache Cordova that lets developers create beautiful and highly interactive cross-platform mobile apps that can be deployed across Android, iOS and Windows devices.
The Ionic framework comes packed with highly mobile-optimized library of CSS , HTML and js components and also features native functionalities, customizable tools and touch optimized gestures to ensure easier interactive app development, minimal maintenance and low costs.
Read Ionic App Development services for more information.
Xamarin
Xamarin is a cross-platform development tool to create apps that deliver a high-quality native experience on all of the major mobile platforms (iOS, Android and Windows). This is a California-based software company founded in 2011, which is now backed by Microsoft.
Xamarin uses C# as the main language for cross-platform development and allows for sharing code between cross-platform mobile applications and maximize code reuse. C# covers all the features of Swift, Objective C and Java. Apps developed with this platform can be tested on a multitude of devices through the company’s cloud services.
Appcelerator Titanium
Appcelerator Titanium is an open-source framework that allows you to create native, hybrid, or mobile web apps across all platforms including iOS, Android and Windows from a single JavaScript code base. Award-winning Titanium uses JavaScript as the main language for development and aims at delivering cross-platform apps with an immersive user experience and a faster time-to-market. It includes an open-source SDK with with over 5,000 APIs for Android, iOS, Windows, Blackberry and HTML5 and hundreds of marketplace modules for extended capabilities. This tool saves time encouraging reuse of 60%–90% of code while supporting multiple platforms and providing Javascript API and native platform-specific features across devices.
React Native
React Native is an open-source framework that lets you build natively rendering iOS and Android applications using JavaScript and React (Facebook’s JavaScript library for building user interfaces). The underlying idea in cross-platform mobile development with React Native is to create apps that are naturally fluid and responsive with the look and feel that is similar to native apps but the native experience is preferred over consistent look and feel. React Native helps developers to build awesome native apps that their users will love, without the having to spend a fortune on building two separate apps.
As you know, using a cross platform development tool can reduce the time and cost associated with developing apps and more businesses are expressing interest in this technology to build their apps.
If you are curious about cross-platform app development or want to know about our cross-platform development services, check out our website for more information.
