5 Pros and Cons of Cross-Platform Mobile App Development for 2020

Whether you are buying a paperclip or an airline ticket, everything is now on your fingertips with a mobile app. Most businesses would prefer a cross-platform mobile app development over native mobile apps, the reason being far more reach and higher traffic. 

On average, a person spends 2.3 hours per day on mobile apps and there have been 204 billion app downloads last year. This makes mobile app development a lucrative business activity for many businesses and corporates. Mobile apps developed for specific mobile operating system platform like android or iOS are called native apps. 

These apps are platform-specific and have high compatibility with the respective operating systems. Several OS provide their software development kits or SDKs for developers to develop native apps with high compatibility and native features. 

Before you dive into the world of cross-platform mobile app development, let’s discuss some pros and cons of using it for your business. 

1. Coding:

Pros: The biggest advantage of choosing a cross-platform mobile app development is code reusability. You can retain almost 50-80% of source code, which can be used on different OS platforms.

Cons: Source Code often does not work well with native environments rendering the mobile apps, poor app performance, and coding complexities.

2. Native Experience:

Pros: We already know that despite the fact that your app is cross-platform, it has to have native compatibility. A cross-platform mobile app development certainly helps your apps to be functional for android and iOS. Techniques like domain-specific language are replaced by general-purpose languages for it.

Cons: Cross- native experience can be trouble with native environments differing from the cross-platform app development codings and programming.

3. Native Integrations:

Pros: With cross-platform mobile app development, businesses can easily integrate their app logic with a common business logic across platforms without too much coding.

Cons: Integrations of native UI elements such as native notifications, messages, navigations, menus and other app feature preferences of the native platform become difficult to integrate into cross-platform apps.

4. Responsive Apps:

Pros: With the cross-platform mobile app development, you can create highly responsive apps that provide users with real-time interactions through the integration of intelligent technologies like the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, and others.

Cons: The issue of GUI(Graphical User Interface) integration persists in cross-platform apps. With the advent of 3D graphics, the UX has reached a new level. But, lack of GUI integration to a certain level provides low UX in cross-platform apps.

5. App Prototyping:

Pros: App prototyping becomes easy and can be done rapidly with the MVP(Minimum Viable Product) approach. Cross-platform apps reduced the need to create separate prototypes for native platforms and a single viable prototype is enough for your mobile app development needs.

Cons: The feedback integration becomes very difficult as there are different issues with the apps at different platforms, which does not become feasible to integrate into cross-platform apps.

Signing Off: 

Smartphone users are increasing in huge numbers and the need for mobile apps will never reduce. So, for businesses, cross-platform app development is like a goldmine, that can bear fruits through great app revenues and huge traffic to your products. So, if you are a business looking to attract more customers, go for cross-platform app development with knowledge of its pros and cons.