Thinking of bringing your mobile app idea to life? Everyone wants it, but not everyone succeeds. While various factors determine the success of the app, the type of app development tool to use plays a key role. The diversity and quality of its plugin libraries and APIs, compatibility and integration aspects are the determining factors of the success of an app.
With platform and device diversity playing a major role in mobile app development, cross-platform app development is emerging as a new, hot trend. Contrary to native app development, a single code base in cross-platform app development can work efficiently on multiple platforms or devices. Hence, cross-platform development cuts the cost of overall app development and the effort put behind to develop apps for different platforms.
The benefits of cross-platform app development are:
- Cost-effectiveness
- Reusable code
- One technology stack
- Easy maintainability
Here are some important aspects you need to consider while choosing the app development tool:
- Framework risk
- Speed considerations
- Development cost
- Feature support
Let’s have a look at the best enterprise tool for cross-platform mobile development:
- NativeScript
- Xamarin
- Appcelerator
- Sencha Touch
- PhoneGap
1. NativeScript
NativeScript is another open-source platform used to build native cross-platform mobile applications using Angular, Typescript, Vue.JS, and JavaScript. Nativescript the most preferred app development framework to build the now trending micro-apps.
NativeScript provides you with every native JavaScript APIs which is ideal for most of the mobile platforms. The existing plugins can be easily reused by the developers from npm directly to the NativeScript projects and can reuse packages from CocoaPods, Gradle, and NPM, thus creating feature-rich apps.
The coding style and structure part of NativeScript apps closely resembles web apps which are based on HTML. NativeScript possesses cross-platform declarative UI support, which helps to make the app’s UI once and implement it across all other platforms.
2. Xamarin
Xamarin helps in building a native app which is compatible with multiple platforms using a single, shared C# codebase. With Xamarin, anything can be done in C#, which is possible with Objective-C, Swift or Java, unlike to what is commonly heard or believed. Xamarin lets you use the same IDE, language and APIs everywhere with ease. Additionally, Git integration is built directly into the Xamarin Studio.
3.Appcelerator
Appcelerator is an open-source cross-platform mobile app development platform, which can help to build an app faster by optimizing the complete process. By using a distinct JavaScript code, mobile apps and native-apps can be developed with cloud-like performance.
The Appcelerator environment is extensible and is capable to build apps for Android, IOS, and Blackberry. Appcelerator has an open-source SDK and has the support of more than 5,000 devices, OS APIs, and IDE Studio.
By using Appcelerator, one can get access to Hyperloop, which is one of the best cross-platform APIs for cross-platform application development.
4. Sencha Touch
Sencha Touch is a leading cross-platform mobile web app framework which makes use of hardware acceleration techniques to build efficient applications. On Sencha, apps with good quality can be built with well-tested, tightly-integrated UI components and libraries present in the tool. Sencha Touch can be used even to build large business applications and maintain them with ease.
5. PhoneGap
PhoneGap, an open-source mobile application development framework, is a great option for building cross-platform mobile apps, leveraging existing web technologies. PhoneGap is best suited for mobile applications which do not use most of the native features of the smartphone. PhoneGap packages your applications within a native application container, allowing JavaScript to access device-level APIs in the same way as a normal app.
Conclusion
Cross-platform app development is the trend of the present age. With a single codebase for all platforms, this saves time and money on developing apps for each platform. Want to know more about how cross-platform development could help your business? Contact us for free consulting.
