Native Mobile App development v/s Cross-Platform Development

We sleep and wake up in a mobile world, and more companies are taking all their business to mobile apps. However, when business owners plan to go mobile, the main challenge they often encounter is selecting the proper mobile technology.

Before developing an app, it’s important to notice that there are different technologies you'll employ. Whether you select to create a native mobile app development , hybrid, or cross-platform app, each of those technologies has its own pros and cons, counting on the character of your project.

In this article, we’ll provide you with some insight into native mobile app development (Android and iOS), and cross-platform technologies (Flutter, React Native, etc.).Then, we’ll also shed some light on the main differences between them.

Native Mobile App Development

Native mobile app development refers to putting together apps exclusively for one platform like android and IOS. These apps are built using the tools available to the precise platform, like Java and Kotlin programming languages for Android and objective C or Swift for the IOS.

Natively built applications are known for his or her exceptionally high performance and amazing user experiences. In native mobile app development, developers have access to all or any the features of devices. this enables them to use complex and advanced functionalities.

Let's see the advantages and disadvantages of the Native mobile app development

Advantages of Native mobile app development

• High performance and enormous functionality

Native mobile app development provide high performance thanks to the direct interaction between the code and therefore the resources. Developers even have access to each tool and API provided by the native platform. Broad functionality available in native mobile app development

• User Experience

With high performance and functionality, native apps offer a tremendous user experience. Designers and developers have more creative freedom to make good-looking also as smooth functioning apps.

• Scalability and Flexibility

Native applications are more scalable because of the flexible development environment and wide selection of obtainable tools. In native apps, the interface is fully compliance with the platform.

Disadvantages of Native app development

• Cost is high

It becomes very costly once you are building applications for android also as for the iOS. Both platforms require separate codebases also as require two separate teams for every platform.

• Longer development time

Native app development is time-consuming as we cannot use an equivalent code for the various platforms. Therefore require different teams for the event of an equivalent application.

Cross-Platform App Development

Cross-platform app development is that the process of developing applications which will run on multiple operating systems like android and iOS. This will be achieved by using tools like React Native, Flutter, or Xamarin. These cross-platform frameworks fit an app to multiple operating systems so we do not need to create different elements for every platform.

Let's see the advantages and disadvantages of cross-platform development.

Advantages of Cross-Platform app development

• Shorter development time

In cross-platform app development, most of the first codebase are often re-used for multiple platforms like android and iOS. This helps developers to scale back the time for creating different codebases and UI elements.

• Cost

In cross-platform development most of the first codebase is employed for multiple platforms hence requires one team which will develop the appliance for multiple platforms. Also, the value of the tools required for various platforms reduces.

• Exposure to an outsized number of users

In cross-platform development, most of the apps run on multiple operating systems gives exposure to an outsized number of uses

Disadvantages of Cross-Platform app development

• Performance

There may be a considerable gap between the performance of native and cross-platform app development. thanks to the necessity for an abstraction layer and rendering process, cross-platform apps are slower than native apps. this is often a serious drawback of cross-platform app development.

• Support of native features

The cross-platform app development framework doesn't support all the features and functionality of the native platforms. Also, the support of third-party libraries is restricted in these frameworks.

• Limited UX

Cross-platform apps don't deliver the UX and UI an equivalent because the native apps. Also, a number of the native elements aren't available on the cross-platform apps.

Summary:

Choosing between native mobile app development and cross-platform app development

As we've seen both Native and cross-platform have their pros and cons. It depends upon the project requirements and resources which one should we use.

Native app development are the simplest choice where high performance is required. It also gives a shocking UI and UX. Also, it requires time and may be very costly, and need an outsized number of teams for developing the applications.

Cross-platform apps take less time for development and also they're cost-efficient because these apps share most of an equivalent codebases for multiple platforms. the disadvantage is that their performance and UX aren't an equivalent as native app development.