With the rise in demand for Smartphones and tablets, it’s probably no surprise that the need for mobile apps is increasing as well. But unfortunately, still many mobile development companies are putting extra efforts in developing individual solutions for different devices. However, with new devices getting developed at a steady rate, it will become difficult or at least “impracticable” to develop for each device separately. This is where cross platform development comes to your rescue.
Although, even cross-platform development solutions are not perfect, but they definitely help make writing an application easier for start-ups or small business organizations. The biggest benefits of creating a cross-platform app is that they require writing minimal code. Since the only single code base is used across multiple devices to run your app, it helps in reducing a lot of development time and money. Furthermore, there are plenty of great tools out there that makes cross-platform app development a hassle-free task for users.
In this post, we’ll shed light on 5 of the most popular and widely-used cross-platform application development platforms worth considering:
1. PhoneGap
PhoneGap requires you to have basic knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, to create mobile apps that can be used across multiple devices. And thus, it saves a lot of development time – that you otherwise might would have spend – in becoming familiar with extra programming languages.
This framework, in general, wrap your app and deploy it to many different mobile platforms. It works on “Write once and run anywhere” concept, and help build apps that support several platforms. The best part is that it even allows an app to access hardware capabilities like camera, GPS/location and much more.
2. Appcelerator
Appcelerator is the second best and widely-used cross-platform tool among app developers. Just like PhoneGap, this framework also helps in building cross-platform apps. But, apart from using HTML and JS, it also makes use of other development languages such as Ruby, Python and PHP to get the job done. Using Appcelerator, one great benefit you get is the ability to store your data either on a mobile device, or in the cloud.
3. WidgetPad
If you’re working on a mobile app project in a team, then you’ll need to collaborate with team members to carry out the development process in an efficient manner. This is where the WidgetPad open-source development environment comes in handy. It helps in creating applications for Smartphone using commonly used web technologies, such as: CSS3, HTML5 and JavaScript.
What’s more? The platform comes shipped with a rich feature set including code editing, debugging, project management, collaboration, and so. It creates apps for iOS, Android and WebOS mobile operating systems.
4. Xamarin
If you’ve good knowledge of writing code in C#, then Xamarin is an ideal fit for your cross-platform app development project. It helps in writing apps purely in C# and allows sharing the code on all the major mobile platforms such as Android, Mac, iOS and a few others. What’s best about Xamarin is that not just help in building apps, but also let you test them on thousands of devices with the help of “Xamarin Test Cloud” service. In fact, after uploading your own created test suite in the cloud, you will receive a comprehensive report, which include test results, screenshots and metrics regarding your app performance.
Furthermore, this development platform also enables users to build apps using either the Xamarin Studio available on Mac or Windows, and even on Visual Studio. Additionally, it even allows adding components to the app directly from the IDE of your choice using the Xamarin Component Store.
Let’s Wrap Up!
Cross-Platform app development isn’t an easy task, and requires you to make several efforts, especially when people are shifting to using mobile devices than desktop systems. But developing codebase for each device can be challenging, and presumably something that’s not practical. But, as more and more users are making use of devices running on different operating systems, it has become more important than ever to consider developing apps that can work across many different devices. Fortunately, there are tools that aid in developing cross-platform mobile apps without much hassle.