What are the types of Mobile Application Development and their Differences?
When it comes to mobile application development, there are two ways you can approach it. Since the smartphone market is divided between Android and iOS, they use their own programming language, thereby you have made two different app installations to work on their respective devices.Â
This is done to reach a wider audience. This type of development is called cross-platform application development. The application is written in one code and then is compiled to its language, ie. it gets translated to its native language. You end with two files (.apk for android devices,.ipa for iOS devices). This type of development is budget-friendly and quick since it requires only one code base to work from. Drawback here is that the development needs to be done in a way to suit both platforms. This puts restrictions on UI/UX design of the application and implementation of certain libraries. Each platform has its own set of guidelines that needs to be followed in order to list your app on their respective app store. So we need to accommodate all the requirements, which again put a limitation on the development of the app. Cross-platform application development is suitable when you need to get the app running and reach a wider audience in less time. This mobile application development method uses Web technologies to develop the app. Thereby makes it dependent on the internet for work. Providing offline features isn't possible with this.
Another way is native application development where an app is developed individually for separate platforms. Development time and cost involved is slightly more compared to cross-platform application development since there are two separate instances of applications being developed at once. But this mobile application development method lets you take full advantage of the platform and provide much better UI/UX experience for the user. There's no much hassle in meeting the requirements to list the application on the app store. Providing updates and introducing new updates is easy which is not the case in cross-platform application development. Also, native application development lets you run certain features run offline.Â
W3villa technologies that provide both types of mobile application development services and have a dedicated team of developers, with different hiring models for you to choose from. We provide a complete host of native applications and cross-platform application development using different frameworks as well.