Have you ever realized how entertaining has life become with the advent of different types of mobile apps? But I am sure that you must be interested in knowing what is making these apps highly performative. Well, let me tell you the development of mobile apps on the basis of different platforms which make these apps amazing.
Now it is needed to know which is the best platform with the help of which you can make an effective mobile app.
Let me tell you that there are three types of classification of Mobile app development based on the technology used – Native apps, Mobile web apps, & Hybrid apps. Most of the apps are built-in Hybrid, which is a cross-platform solution and this is considered to be one of the best for your business needs. Mobile app development companies across the world are being asked by the clients to develop hybrid mobile apps
Now the question arises, why choose Cross-platform?
Following are the reasons which show the importance of Cross-platform. Just have a keen look at them:
- Helps to reduce the development cycle: Cross-platform makes it possible to share up to 96% of codes across several platforms. And it is obvious that it would lead to a much shorter development cycle: You can develop only one app by avoiding the procedure of developing two separate apps. And after that, share that code among operating systems while making platform-specific adjustments.
- Cost efficiency: Cross-platform is obviously cheaper in comparison to other platforms. You are just required to pay only a few developers for fewer hours of work.
Have a look at some of the several tools available in Hybrid cross-platform solutions:
Xamarin
React Native
Flutter
Kotlin Native
J2ObjC/Doppler
Progressive Web Apps (PWA)
Ionic2
Cordova/PhoneGap/Titanium
Unity
Among the above-mentioned platforms, we are going to pick the best three which are: Xamarin, React Native and Flutter and will make a comparison among them.
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Xamarin
Xamarin is cross-platform with C# and native platform libraries which were launched in May 2011 and then adopted by Microsoft. There are three main components of this technology: Xamarin Platform, Xamarin Cloud, and Xamarin Insights.
Xamarin platform holds the most important position as the element of Xamarin,
Xamarin Platform is considered the most important element of Xamarin, offering APIs, controls, runtime engines, encryption, authentication, virtual machines, and much more. Xamarin offers an automated testing platform in order to ensure your product’s quality on a variety of devices. Xamarin Insights is a monitoring tool which helps developers in tracking application crashes as well as expectations.
Advantages of Xamarin
- This framework functions amazingly as it uses C# language. That is why this has been considered better than other platforms that are (Android, iOS, and Windows)
- It has been considered that more than 1.4 million developers used Xamarin in the first quarter of 2017, because of its ability to write native UI codebase for mobile app development
- If in case, you desire to build an app for different platforms such as Android, iOS, etc, at that time, you are allowed to reuse most of the code in your app for other platforms.
- Access to native API: You can have the platform-centered functionalities in your app
- Various controls and layouts that are available in Xamarin helps with a faster development process
- Faster app development with NuGet and Xamarin plugins
- This cross-platform development framework, with the help of various well-known brands, provides competitiveness in order to develop an outstanding native app interface that successfully outperforms the limitations of hybrid apps
- Offline application support.
- As it is supported with features like cloud and data synchronization, it helps the applications to work offline, which is considered as the ability that used to be limited to native apps only.
Disadvantages of Xamarin
- One of the main disadvantages of Xamarin is that it is not at all free and you are required to buy it. That is why it could not be considered for startups and budget constraints business.
- Another disadvantage of it is that you cannot have unlimited access to various important libraries in order to create an app.
- Here is it’s on more disadvantage that User-Interface (UI) development is time-co er disadvantage of it is that you cannot have unlimited access to various important libraries in order to create an app.
- As it suffers from low community activity, Xamarin is not considered good in order to develop a framework.
- When developers are creating with Xamarin, developers are required to link and reference code between various operating systems and .NET frameworks. And this will affect application startup and download times in a negative way. And this will make this experience less pleasant for the number of users.
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Flutter
Flutter is one of the best tools which is used for cross-platform mobile development. Its development and support have been maintained by Google. Flutter with the help of Dart and a collection of native widgets create amazing cross-platform apps. Here, you are not required to build up an iOs and Android app individually. What you need is a single codebase for both platforms.
What is Flutter?
- Flutter is an open-source and free platform.
- It is based on Dart – a quick, object-oriented programming language which is easy to learn
- Dart which is a very easy language, a quick object-oriented as well as a programming language
- It offers its own specific gadgets which are drawn with its own superior rendering motor. They are fast, amazing and flexible.
- The basis of Flutter architecture is reactive programming, which is famous nowadays.
Advantages of Flutter
- It supports faster codes writing which is done within seconds and is helpful for a team with providing a lot of features, fixing bugs, and experimenting faster.
- Developers are required to write a single code which is used for app covering both Android and iOS platforms.
- Availability of similar apps for two platforms means that there is a need for less time in testing and the procedure of Quality Assurance process can be faster.
- It is easy to make your own widgets or design existing widgets like material design widgets or Cupertino widgets.
- Suitable for MVP as you are required to build the app in less time.
Disadvantages of Flutter
- Flutter has not released the constant version yet as it is still in beta. Apart from this, Continuous Integration (CI) platforms such as Travis or Jenkins are not supporting it. So your development team is required to use and keep custom content in order to get automatic building, app testing, ad deployment.
- Flutter is having the support of Google and there could be seen various different libraries with a lot of features that are ready to implement. Apart from this, Futter is not considered rich as compared to native development.
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React Native
React Native is an open-source mobile development framework, first presented by Facebook in 2015, for the sake of cross-platform mobile development. As it uses javascript in order to build a native app. With the help of React Native, you can develop iOS and Android application with javascript as well as native component APIs.
Advantages of React Native
- There are various ready to apply elements offered by a React Native that can help in fastening the development time Hot Reload: You are allowed to reload your application as soon as possible, without recompiling.
- There is direct use of native code in order to optimize your app to a great extent.
- There can be a code sharing on iOS and Android both the platforms.
- It supports faster app development along with pre-built elements.
- There could be seen access to features like camera, accelerometer, and so on.
- High-quality mobile UI
Disadvantages of React Native
The first disadvantage is that you cannot tantamount to native navigation in the navigation of your mobile app as the navigation design of the React Native is not at all that much smoother.
Like Xamarin, with the help of React Native, you can get a chance to develop applications of superior quality. Let me tell you that the performance of the apps that are built with React Native is slower as compared to the apps that are built with native Android apps with Java and native iOS apps along with Objective-C and Swift.
Final words
Hopefully, after going through the whole article, you might have got an idea that what are the major differences among these three mobile development platforms along with their advantages and disadvantages.
After analyzing, choose a good hybrid app development company who can help you to build mobile apps based on one of these platforms.