Cross-platform mobile app development since its nascent days, has been the holy grail of developing mobile applications software. If you could walk down the memory lane and reminisce Adobe Flash, the exclusive cross-platform development tool that ran on any browser and operating system (including early versions of Android). Later, came HTML5 and then cross platform development tools kept on progressing with the passage of time. Now tools and technology have gone way more advanced as they were few years ago. Latest cross-platform app development code provisions the concept of write once, run anywhere (WORA). WORA enables developer to use only one platform to write and build codebase. Once codebase is compiled and built, it can be easily deployed to run on multifarious platforms. WORA easily puts native app development in the cage of heritage; overcoming all challenges that native development faced. With the latest cross platform tools in the market, it has become much easier to leverage the effort and time on part of the developer. Now, developers can proficiently reuse the same source code built in one environment, to design apps that work efficiently and effectively on multiple platforms, including iOS, Android and Windows. This in turn leads to getting more time window to market your app and cut down on maintenance and development costs. From a developer’s standpoint or point of view we are going to share some of the top and established cross-platform mobile app development tools that can help you in designing productive and cutting edge apps in a lesser time than ever.
Xamarin
Xamarin, a cross platform development tool owned by Microsoft, that lets developers build native iOS and Android apps. The biggest benefit of Xamarin is that developers can build apps using C# codebase, a programming language all developers are familiar with. The other advantage of this tool is apps compiled on Xamarin run directly on a smartphones hardware and not in a web view. It is an excellent tool and any professional developer would love to work with it. Xamarin sanctions developers to use the same language, IDE and APIs everywhere and also developers have direct access to native APIs, which means developers can use platform-specific frameworks like iOS’s ARKit too. With Xamarin platform, developer has the ease to share code, which means an app can be compiled ahead of time at a decreased cost and the app will also not suffer any performance drawbacks (which web based tools usually have).
PhoneGap
PhoneGap is a cross-platform development tool by Adobe that relies on web technologies to create apps for Android and iOS. With PhoneGap you can use multiple codebase (CSS, HTML and JavaScript) to build a mobile app. with a native look and feel, without needing to write the same code twice for different platforms. PhoneGap provides a unified approach for web technology that has a native look and feel. And resolves the problem of needing to write the same code multiple times for different platforms. With PhoneGap you can access platform-specific code by using plugins. It also offers unified APIs to interact with external hardware such as the camera, file storage, media library and GPS. The resulting app might look like a native Android or iOS app, but in reality the underlying code may vary between multifarious platforms.
Appcelerator
Appcelerator tool enables coders to create cross-platform apps with lightning speed. The app development tool arrays a JavaScript codebase. The Appcelerator tool has is extensible and has an open-source software development kit that supports up to 5,000 devices. Appcelerator also supports Eclipse-based IDE Studio, other OS APIs and the MVC framework Alloy. Using this tool, developer can create apps for platforms ranging Android, iOS to BlackBerry. The best feature of this tool is that it supports HTML5 and even hybrid apps. With no other limitations, the only shortcoming on this tool’s behalf is its Support Team and developer community’s response time which is medially slow. In my opinion this is another very useful tool. Ionic
Ionic is a robust open-source app development platform for mobile apps and web developers. It is a unified SDK for building cross platform mobile applications using latest web technologies like HTML5, SASS and CSS. Ionic helps developers build standard Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) and hybrid cross platform apps. Ionic’s framework supports more than 120 native device features, including HealthKit, Fingerprint Auth and Bluetooth. It also features compatibility with Cordova/PhoneGap plugins and TypeScript extensions and thus furthering improving its useful for the developers. It was developed by Drifty Co in year 2013. It also provides a command line interface that can be used by developers for their projects.
React Native
React Native has gained much popularity in the past few years. React Native is lesser of a tool and more of an open-source framework. With React Native you can use native UI controls to create declarative UI and yet have full access to native platform. React Native uses distinct JavaScript codebase to control native components for cross-platform development. Working with React Native developers don’t have to learn iOS development specifically and neither do they have to rely on slow web views to render applications. This all is possible because React Native interprets JavaScript at runtime to display native UI elements and respond to user interaction. After Xamarin, React Native is the only framework that has perfected the art of WORA (write once, run anywhere). Simply put, it is capable of sharing codebase without any performance limitations or deployment bottlenecks.
MonoCross
MonoCross is well-designed open-source cross-platform mobile app development framework that lets developers concurrently create interactive and engaging apps on iOS, Android, Webkit enabled phones and Windows. MonoCross makes use of Mono framework, Microsoft.NET and C#. MonoCross leverages flexibility to write the app source code once and deploy it on all supporting platforms and architectures. With MonoCross you also get to have a custom user interface (UI) for each platform you deploy codebase on. It is being used by large Fortune 500 enterprises thus showing its reliability.
Take Aways
The cross-platform mobile app development tools are fairly versatile, nifty and well-designed. Though app development tools are bound to evolve, as new OS concepts and development paradigms rise to fame, such tools will remain neoteric for the years to come. If you are a small business or a startup looking for robust cross-platform app development and mobile gaming apps development and design, CMOLDS can be your knight in shining armor.
With mobile apps diversity dominating the mobile sphere, cross-platform development has emerged as a commercially best option. Unlike native app development, a single code created with a cross-platform mobile app development tools 2019 can be used for multiple platforms.