Benefits of developing Cross-Platform Applications

In those days, native applications were used for web and mobile applications development and they work best only on the platform they were developed for. Such applications cannot work at once on multiple platforms. If at all they would work on another platform, another set of codes needs to be written, in fact it is another project entirely. But nowadays, cross-platform applications are becoming increasingly popular and there are a lot of software applications in the market today that are developed for multiple platforms.  Cross platform development is about developing mobile applications that can work on different platforms without any difficulty.

Cross-platform applications provide ensures a wider reach, this means that you can develop many mobile platforms and reach a larger audience. You can develop a mobile application that can run on Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone or iPhone. The more platforms you develop for, the larger your audience. This will also give you an opportunity to reach a global market. You can market widely across the global countries. If you restrict yourself to only a platform, you will only reach the audience using only the platform. The most amazing thing about developing cross platform applications is the development speed for multiple platforms. You won’t believe how fast you can build an application for more than four platforms. If you build a set of code for a platform, you can easily re-use them for other platforms. This helps to maintain consistency and quality across all the platforms. Similarly, you can use the same set of codes for a future project with the same goals.

Cross platform applications are easy to develop; however, the developer must be technically skilled and must have some experience. Each platform may have the same look and feel because they have similar codebase.  Developing cross-platform applications is extremely cost effective. You will spend less for many, unless you want to develop an application with a different customization. However, this has its own disadvantages because this means that each user will have different user experiences when using the application.  Meanwhile, the multiple platforms are supposed to have the same user experiences.

There are several development frameworks or tools such as PhoneGap, Xamarin, Appcelerator and many others, which offer a variety of extensions that make it easy to develop the application’s interface and improve its functionality. The development tools make teamwork simple and flexible because the team of developers can deploy changes without affecting each other’s tasks. Most of these tools also facilitate easy integration of enterprises or cloud services. Using exchange integration with cloud services like Salesforce or Amazon AWS allows the application to automatically work on several platforms.

There are also mobile widgets that contribute massively to the development of cross platform applications especially mobile. These widgets are wide-ranging and have different functionalities. For instance, there are widgets that can be used to distribute applications to a wide audience. Another interesting thing about some of the development tools is that they are open source created by several developers from all over the world. With these tools, you can develop and maintain your applications.

About Author