Is Cross-Platform Mobile App the Right Solution for Startups

When you open a start-up, you must have a lot of aspirations to reach a wide audience and grow your business? And without a digital destination, it’s difficult to achieve the same. In this mobile-driven era, it’s always advisable to craft an app that offers a superb user-experience.

When it comes to developing a mobile app, business owners are often confused about whether to develop a native app or a hybrid app. These days, there’s an increasing demand for crafting a cross-platform application for newly launched businesses. Wondering why? This blog finds the answer to this question. Today, we will explore why a cross-platform mobile app is an ideal solution for start-ups.

Benefits of Developing a Cross-Platform Mobile App

#Get access to a wide audience
If you craft a native app, you can reach the audience available on a specific operating system. When you are launching a startup, you must have an aim to reach as many people as you can, isn’t it? A hybrid app actively helps in that.

Once you develop a hybrid application, both iOS and Android users can use your app. This saves you some bucks as you need not create two distinct native applications to reach the users on Android and iOS devices. It also saves time and effort.

#Single codebase
Developing a hybrid app doesn’t require the developers to write distinct codes for different operating systems. The providers of mobile app development services can create fully-functional apps for iOS and Android using a single codebase. You can transform your app ideas into a stunning mobile application that can seamlessly perform across all the available platforms. The best part is that the devs can customize and modify any feature of the apps for both platforms by making some minor tweaks in a single codebase. This increases efficiency.

#Ideal for MVP development
Startup owners prefer to build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) at the beginning in a limited budget. As their business grows, they can scale up the application. A cross-platform app is ideal for MVP development because the startup owners can get an insight into the app’s usage and demand among the Android and iPhone users.

Depending on the insights, they can plan their app marketing strategy and focus on a specific set of audience. After conducting a thorough market research, they can later add other features & UI elements to enhance user experience. MVP is a great tool for streamlining a small enterprise.

#Faster time to market
Cross-platform mobile apps capitalize on the concept “code once and run everywhere”. This significantly impacts the development time. The proficient mobility solution providers can complete your project within a quick turnaround time. Further, QA experts can test only one version of the application instead of testing an app on two distinct operating systems. This reduces TTM (time to market) and ensures a fast deployment.

Availability of excellent tools

In this section, we will outline four handpicked tools to develop cross-platform applications.

1. PhoneGap
This is a cross-platform mobile app development framework by Adobe System. The developers need to have proficiency in programming languages like JavaScript, CSS, and HTML to work with PhoneGap. PhoneGap powers app development for various popular operating systems including Android, iOS, Windows, etc. Extensive plugin library, robust developer community, and diverse toolset allow the developers to craft mobile apps real fast.

2. Ionic
Ionic offers a library of excellent UI components, tools and gestures to craft fast and highly interactive apps. The developers can start with readymade components, typography and an out-of-the-box base theme that adapts to different operating systems. Leveraging the Adaptive Styling of Ionic, the app offers a seamless user experience on every platform and device. The advanced Command-Line Interface (CLI) of Ionic allows an efficient developing, testing, and deploying of any app. Ionic makes it easy to access native device functionalities and features. It has a rich library of 120 native device plugins to access Geolocation, Camera, Bluetooth and more. Features like Live Reload, cross-platform deployments and integrations make Ionic extremely developer-friendly. Should you seek to develop an Ionic-based hybrid app, engage Ionic development services for the best results.

3. Flutter
Flutter is Google’s open-source UI toolkit that helps the developers to build robust, expressive, feature-rich and scalable mobile apps for different platforms using a single codebase. It is based on Dart language that works perfectly for crafting enterprise-level cross-platform apps. Its flexible and expressive UI elements focus on delivering a native end-user experience. Its layered architecture allows complete customization that results in blazing-fast rendering and stunning designs. Flutter’s widgets incorporate critical platform differentiators such as navigations, scrolling, icons and fonts. Flutter codes are compiled to a native ARM machine code using the native compiler of Dart. Its hot reload feature helps the developers to efficiently develop UIs, add features, and fix bugs real fast. Hire Flutter developers from a trusted company to leverage these benefits and craft a superb cross-platform mobile app.

4. React Native
Backed by Facebook and used by the industry giants like Instagram, Walmart, Facebook, Airbnb, Walmart, UberEats, etc. React Native is a mobile app development tool to create feature-rich applications for Android, iOS, and UWP platforms. React Native used JavaScript and React library to offer a rich user experience. It also allows the developers to write a few components in Java, Objective-C, and Swift if required. That way, all the features and functionalities of the app offers a top-notch UX. The framework uses native APIs and components that help the app to provide a native appearance and feel. You can hire React developers to get a high-performing mobile app.

Our Take
As you can see, cross-platform apps are highly profitable for start-ups due to all the money, time and effort they help to save! Now you understand why hybrid app development India and abroad is on a rise, right? If you got any thoughts, feel free to share with us in the comment section below.