Native vs. Cross-platform app development
The mobile app industry worldwide has undergone some major changes in the past few years. In 2017, Android and iOS, the two most popular operating systems used for smartphones, held a market share of 85.1% and 14.8%, respectively.
As of March 2018, there were 3.8 million Android apps in Google Play and 2 million iOS apps in Apple’s App Store.
With so much mobile app demand, programmers are having to work out new ways to stay one step ahead of the game. They’re searching for tools to cross the iOS-Android divide and provide exceptional performance, easy navigation, and great visual appeal that mobile app users usually demand. This is why cross-platform options are getting popular and functional.
Most development companies now utilize mobile apps as a platform for raising brand awareness, not a business of their own. With the increasing adoption of AI solutions (namely chatbots, smart wallets, messengers, etc.) experts even start to discuss mobile apps’ future!
Amid the controversy and chaos, the “native vs. cross-platform” mobile app development topic is very popular nowadays.
Let’s get into a talk about the differences between native and cross-platform applications.
Native app development
Native applications are developed using platform-specific programming languages. For example, some programming languages that can be utilized for developing Android apps include Java, Kotlin.
Objective-C and Swift are the languages used for the iOS mobile operating system. The native apps are developed specifically to be run on the target platform — with the support of all the native technologies and other hardware components such as camera and calendar.
Cross-platform apps are mostly developed by using React Native, Flutter, Ionic, Xamarin, and many more.
Advantages of Native mobile apps
High performance
Since the technologies utilized in developing native applications are platform-specific, the native code experiences direct access to the host’s operating system and functionalities.
This exceptional interaction with the native features of the mobile devices provides the high performance of the application, especially when rendering graphics or multimedia content.
Therefore, developing complex applications using native code could decrease the risks of downtimes from crashes or freezes.
Better User Interface
Since native apps integrate with the mobile operating system efficiently, customers are able to navigate a familiar interface without many problems, resulting in high user experiences (UX) and repeated use.
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